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South Korea: language policy andplanning in the makingJae Jung Song aa Linguistics Programme , University of Otago , Dunedin , NewZealandPublished online: 28 Feb 2012.

To cite this article: Jae Jung Song (2012) South Korea: language policy and planning in the making,Current Issues in Language Planning, 13:1, 1-68, DOI: 10.1080/14664208.2012.650322

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South Korea: language policy and planning in the making

Jae Jung Song*

Linguistics Programme, University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand

(Received 13 July 2011; final version received 12 December 2011)

This monograph discusses South Korea’s language situation in a language policy andplanning context. This monograph consists of four parts. Part 1 presents a genetic,typological and sociolinguistic description of South Korea’s national language, and anoverview of minority languages, including English as well as other languages,recently transported into the country by migrant workers and foreign brides. Alsoincluded is information on the native writing system called Hankul. Part 2 focuses onlanguage spread and maintenance through the national education system and othermeans. Part 3 concerns the major issues in South Korea’s language planning andpolicy, including orthographic reforms, lexical purification, the use and teaching ofChinese characters, digitization of Korean, and ‘linguistic reunification’ of North andSouth Korea. The final part of the monograph explores future prospects of SouthKorea’s language policy, some of the major issues being the ‘linguistic reunification’of North and South Korea, the status and role of English and Chinese, and emergentmultilingualism. The monograph also contains some thoughts on how languageplanning and policy might need to develop in the future, especially with respect toissues that do not directly concern the national language, e.g. emergent multilingualism.

Keywords: Korean; language planning; language policy; language spread; minoritylanguages; South Korea

Introduction

North and South Korea present a highly unusual, if not unique, language situation.1 Koreahas been a largely monolingual society since Shilla Dynasty’s unification of the KoreanPeninsula in the seventh-century CE. It had also been a more or less unified kingdomand nation until 1945, when it was partitioned into communist North Korea and capitalistSouth Korea as a consequence of the post-World War II global polarization. While Koreanis the national language of the two ideologically opposed states, Standard South Korean(known as Phyocwune ‘standard language’) is based on the speech of Seoul (i.e. thecapital of South Korea) and Standard North Korean (known as Mwunhwae ‘culturedlanguage’) on the speech of Pyongyang (i.e. the capital of North Korea). It is not difficultto understand what implications or consequences this politico-ideological opposition hasover the past several decades had for the two Koreas’ (diverging) language policy and plan-ning measures. One must, however, hasten to add that in general, North and South Koreahave also been relatively reluctant to introduce radical language planning measures and

ISSN 1466-4208 print/ISSN 1747-7506 online© 2012 Taylor & Francishttp://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14664208.2012.650322http://www.tandfonline.com

*Email: jaejung.song@otago.ac.nz

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policies in anticipation of their reunification, which is probably a question of when, not aquestion of if. While it may be an interesting exercise to compare differences and simi-larities in language planning and policy between North and South Korea, this monographwill focus on South Korea’s sociolinguistic situation in a language policy and planningcontext, although occasional references will unavoidably be made to North Korea (for adetailed discussion of North Korea’s language policy and planning, see Kaplan &Baldauf, 2011; C.-W. Kim, 1978, 1991; Song, 2001).

The geographical profile of South Korea

South Korea (known officially as the Republic of Korea) is located in the southern half ofthe Korean Peninsula (Figure 1). The peninsula itself is bounded in the north by Chinaand Russia, in the south by the Korea Straits, in the east by the Sea of Japan (or

Figure 1. South Korea. Source: http://geology.com/world/south-korea-satellite-image.shtml.

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Tonghay ‘the East Sea’, as Koreans prefer to call it) and in the west by the Yellow Sea (orHwanghay ‘the Yellow Sea’ in Korean) (Figure 2). South Korea and eastern China (i.e.the Shandong Peninsula) are separated by 200 km, and the shortest distance betweenSouth Korea and Japan across the Korea Strait is also 200 km. The northern boundarywith China and Russia is clearly demarcated by the Yalu River (or Amnokkang inKorean) and the Tumen River (or Tumankang in Korean). The Korean Peninsula liesbetween 33°06′40″N and 43°00′39″N parallels and 124°11′00″E and 131°52′42″E meri-dians. Longitudinally, Korea is situated near the Philippines or central Australia, while thelatitudinal location of the Korean Peninsula is similar to that of the Iberian Peninsula andGreece in the west and also to the state of California in the east. The total area of the ter-ritory, inclusive of its islands, is 221,154 square kilometres. About 45% of this area isoccupied by South Korea, and the remaining by North Korea. The combined area ofNorth and South Korea is about the size of Britain and Guyana, with South Koreaabout the size of Hungary or Jordan. South Korea, with 49 million people, is regardedas one of the most densely populated countries in the world, with about 440 people persquare kilometre. (North Korea, on the other hand, has about 181 people per square kilo-metre.) The population density of South Korea exceeds those of most Asian countriesincluding China and India. In South Korea, most people are concentrated in majorcities such as Seoul (almost 11 million) and Pusan (over 4 million). Other major cities,including Inchon, Kwangju, Taegu, Taejon and Ulsan, have over one million peopleeach. This urbanization of the population, fuelled by South Korea’s industrialization inthe 1960s and 1970s, has now concentrated over 85% of South Korea’s population inthese main cities.

Figure 2. Korea and the region. Source: http://geology.com/world/asia-satellite-image.shtml.

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Socio-historical background

The origins of the Korean people are far from clear. Scholars, however, generally agree thatthe Korean Peninsula was settled by humans migrating from the north, not from the south(e.g. Barnes, 1999; Janhunen, 1996; J.-h. Kim, 1978). The Late Pleistocene, which beganbetween 130,000 and 75,000 years ago, witnessed the appearance of modern humans inEast Asia. During subsequent cold phases, sea levels in East Asia were much lower, trans-forming the Sea of Japan into a large lake that drained through what is the Korea Straittoday. This must have resulted in increased land areas, allowing humans to move relativelyfreely among parts of East Asia. These prehistoric people may not be directly related tomodern Koreans, however. Archaeological evidence suggests that humans, probably Paleo-siberians, also reached the Korean Peninsula over 30,000 years ago. About 4000–5000years ago, a different race started to migrate from the north – probably north-easternSiberia, Mongolia, Manchuria and northern China – towards the Korean Peninsula. It isbelieved that these people were ancient Koreans. But, of course, it cannot be ruled outthat they may have exchanged their genes with the ‘old’ inhabitants, although the majorityof the latter may probably have migrated further or have been driven into north-easternManchuria and Japan. It thus seems safe to conclude, contrary to what many Koreanswould like to believe, that the Korean people may not be racially homogeneous but are des-cendants of the various waves of migration from the north. Some ancient Koreans settled inManchuria and northern Korea, while others ventured further down to southern Korea, andprobably also across the Korea Strait into Japan.

By the fourth century CE, a few tribal states had emerged in these areas, the most pro-minent ones being Kokuryo in southern Manchuria (or the Liaodong region) and northernKorea, and Paekche and Shilla in southern Korea. The territorial ambition and rivalry ofthese three kingdoms led to a series of wars, and Shilla, with the aid from Tang China,gained the upper hand and eventually unified the three kingdoms in 668. The UnifiedShilla Kingdom (668–892) is said to have achieved political unity on the Korean Peninsula.Towards the end of the eighth century CE, Unified Shilla started to decline. This weakeninggave rise to a number of insurgent groups, out of which one kingdom emerged as the newruler of the Korean Peninsula. This kingdom, claiming to be the successor of Kokuryo,called itself Koryo (918–1392). (The name, incidentally, gave rise to the English name,Korea.) Ethnic Koreans also migrated from the north in the wake of the collapse in 926 ofParhae (or Bohai in Chinese), a largely Tungusic-based kingdom. This process of ethnichomogenization, however, was marred by incessant conflicts with neighbours (e.g. Japanesemarauders and pirates). The Mongol invasion (i.e. the Yuan Dynasty), which began in 1231and lasted for over 100 years, was the last nail in the Koryo Dynasty’s coffin. Koryo met itsfate in 1388when the general sent to assist theMongols againstMing China turned around tooverthrow the monarchy. The event gave rise to the birth of the last Korean dynasty, i.e. YiChoson (1392–1910). This is the dynasty during which the northern boundary of Korea wasdemarcated along the Yalu and Tumen Rivers (i.e. the present North Korea–China border).The Yi Choson Dynasty’s capital was moved from Songhak (now Kaesong) to Hanyang(now Seoul). Early political instability within the royal house notwithstanding, the firsttwo hundred years of Yi Choson can be characterized as relatively peaceful, and indeedmany notable cultural and scientific achievements were made during this period, especiallyduring the reign of King Sejong (1417–1450), the most remarkable being the invention of asophisticated but simple writing system called Hankul.

The nineteenth century witnessed the emergence of East Asia as one of the major thea-tres for a number of imperial powers, namely Japan, Russia, the US, Britain, France and

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Germany. Qing China fell prey to the British Empire and other Western powers. After cen-turies of foreign invasion (e.g. the Japanese invasion (1592–1598), the Manchu invasion in1627 and in 1636) and power struggle within the ruling class, Yi Choson also found itselfcompletely unprepared for what was about to descend upon it. With the USA, Britain,France and Germany occupying their colonies elsewhere, it was left to Japan, Russia andQing China to decide on Yi Choson’s fate. The competing interests among these regionalpowers finally came to a head when Japan and Qing China, and Japan and Russia went towar in 1894 and in 1904, respectively. Japan came out as the victor in both the wars. (Inbetween these wars, Yi Choson changed its name to Tayhan Ceykwuk ‘the Great HanEmpire’.) Japan wasted little time in setting in motion its plans to force the KoreanEmperor to abdicate his throne, annexing Korea in 1910. The Japanese Empire wouldoccupy Korea as a colony for the next 35 years. With many Koreans forced out of theirland into Manchuria and elsewhere, more and more Japanese started to migrate to Korea.The Japanese civilian population in Korea stood at 171,000 in 1910 but increased to750,000 in 1945, when Japan surrendered to the Allied Forces. When World War IIended in 1945, Korea gained independence from Japan, but it was immediately dividedup into North Korea and South Korea at the 38th parallel of north latitude, the formerunder the USSR influence, and the latter under the US influence. Subsequently, SouthKorea became the Republic of Korea and North Korea the Democratic People’s Republicof Korea. Relations between the two Koreas rapidly deteriorated, resulting in frequentborder conflicts and subsequently in the Korean War (1950–1953). Since the armistice in1953, virtually no communication between North and South Koreans has been possible,except for intermittent high-level governmental dialogues (which began in 1971 and con-tinued intermittently thereafter). There have recently been some signs of a rapprochementand of efforts towards reunification (e.g. South Korea’s direct investment in North Korea,small-scale family reunions), although these positive signs are, more frequently than not,undermined by recurrent tensions between the two Koreas over issues such as NorthKorea’s nuclear weapons and the South Korea–US military exercises.

Initially, South Korea economically lagged behind North Korea, which was rapidlyindustrializing itself with its abundant natural resources and with generous aid from Chinaand the USSR. South Korea, however, underwent a series of successful economic develop-ment plans in the 1960s and 1970s, achievingwhat SouthKoreans call theMiracle on theHanRiver (by analogy with the Miracle on the Rhine River in West Germany). Ranking 14th inthe world in terms of GDP, South Korea is now regarded as one of the most affluent countriesin the world. South Korea’s manufactured goods (e.g. Hyundai, LG and Samsung) includingautomobiles, TVs, domestic appliances and computers now compete in the world marketwith those from Japan, the USA and other West European countries. North Korea’seconomy, in contrast, began to stall in the mid-1960s when the financial support fromChina and the USSR started to diminish. In 1990, North Korea started to record a negativegrowth in GDP and, as widely reported in the media, is currently experiencing a seriouseconomic crisis to the point of a potential humanitarian disaster.

Language policy and planning

Cooper (1989, pp. 30–31) lists as many as 12 different definitions of language planning, andto these definitions a few more recent ones (e.g. Clyne, 2003; Kaplan & Baldauf, 1997;Shohamy, 2006; Spolsky, 2004; Wright, 2004) can be added with ease. FollowingCooper’s (1989, p. 31) suggestion, one can define language planning by asking a generalquestion ‘Who plans what for whom and how?’ Different researchers, as indicated by

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the large number of competing definitions, may answer this question differently. Forinstance, some may confine their discussion to the language planning undertaken by author-itative institutions (e.g. government agencies, national or regional organizations, etc.),while others may be less restrictive in that they include the language planning efforts of(influential) individuals or groups at a grass-roots level. This is not the place to evaluatethese different definitions. Suffice it to quote one definition here: ‘[l]anguage planning isa body of ideas, laws and regulations (language policy), change rules, beliefs, and practicesintended to achieve a planned change (or to stop change from happening) in the languageuse in one or more communities’ (Kaplan & Baldauf, 1997, p. 3). Put differently, languageplanning is a deliberate, conscious attempt – regardless of whether or not such an attempt isopenly expressed to language users – to bring about ‘future-oriented change in systems oflanguage code and/or speaking in a societal context’ [emphasis original] (Kaplan &Baldauf, 1997, p. 3, based on Rubin & Jernudd, 1971). This way, language planning isnever part of ‘natural evolution’ of language but rather of ‘human intervention workingto achieve specific desired purposes’ (Gottlieb, 2008, p. 3). When such a deliberateattempt is formulated and also proclaimed, as may usually be the case, as an explicitplan or measure, one is dealing with language policy (Spolsky, 2004, p. 11).

There are three additional comments to bemade here for the purposes of this monograph.First, attention will be paid only to the macro language planning, undertaken by authoritativeinstitutions, including national or regional NGOs. Thus individual or more generally, microlanguage planning efforts fall outside the purview of the present work (on macro vs. microlanguage planning, see Kaplan & Baldauf, 1997, p. 52). Second, Kloss’s (1968) classic dis-tinction between status planning and corpus planning, will be assumed here. Status planningessentially concerns social issues, i.e. the choice of a language or a language variety. Twodifferent issues have been identified under status planning (Kaplan & Baldauf, 1997,pp. 30–38): language selection and language implementation. The first issue is self-explana-tory: a language or language variety needs to be chosen for a society or community as awhole, typically by the government or the segment of the society in power or authority.The second issue deals with the way the chosen language or language variety is to beadopted and spread, typically through the education system. Corpus planning, in contrast,is ‘internal to language’ (Kaplan & Baldauf, 1997, p. 38). That is to say that corpus planningconcerns linguistic issues such as coining new words, lexical development, adopting and/orreforming orthographic systems, changes in style and standardizing a language. To Kloss’sbinary distinction in language planning, a third category, i.e. ‘acquisition planning’ mayperhaps be added (Cooper, 1989, pp. 33–34).2 Once selected for a society, a language ora language variety has to be spread among its members through education. This way, a con-certed effort is made to ‘increase the number of users – speakers, writers, listeners, orreaders’ (Cooper, 1989, p. 33). Hence there is a need for a separate category, distinct fromstatus and corpus planning. As Kaplan and Baldauf (1997, p. 121) point out, however, acqui-sition planning should be embedded in the overall context of status/corpus planning for thesuccess of ‘independently implemented “acquisition plans”’. To wit, Cooper’s acquisitionplanning can be safely subsumed under Kloss’s original status/corpus planning. Similarly,Haarmann (1990) points to the importance of ‘prestige planning’, i.e. a whole range of activi-ties designed to appeal to the receptive value function of various status/corpus planningactivities. Useful as this concept maybe, the socio-psychological background that mayplay an important role in the success of language planning measures – status planning, inparticular – hinges largely on prestige or receptive values already held widely withinsociety. Thus, Haarmann’s ‘prestige planning’ also does not need to be invoked separatelyin the context of language planning. Third, while Kloss’s binary distinction between status

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and corpus planning holds much heuristic or analytical value, these two types of languageplanning do not necessarily occur, one after the other, in a sequential manner, i.e. statusplanning preceding corpus planning. Indeed linguistic issues (i.e. corpus planning) cannotbe dissociated from social issues (i.e. status planning) or vice versa, simply because languageuse does not take place in a social vacuum. AsKaplan and Baldauf (1997, p. 49) sum up, ‘it isinevitably the case that changes in the language affect the sectors/registers in which thelanguage is being/can be used, and these changes in turn define in a new way the languagesituation’. To wit, status and corpus planning are inextricably intertwined with each other.

Outline of the monograph

This monograph comprises four parts. Part 1 presents a typological, genetic and sociolin-guistic description of South Korea’s national language, and a sociolinguistic overview ofminority languages with particular reference to English. Particular attention will also bepaid to the status and role of English – in view of the recent debate over the adoption ofEnglish as South Korea’s official language – and other minority languages, recently trans-ported into the country by migrant workers and foreign brides. Also included is informationon the origins of the native writing system called Hankul, and the subsequent parallel use ofHankul and Chinese characters. Part 2 focuses on the way the national language and foreignlanguages are taught through the education system. Part 3 concerns the major issues inSouth Korea’s language planning and policy, including orthographic conventions andreforms, purification of Standard South Korean, the use and teaching of Chinese characters,digitization and computerization of Korean, ‘linguistic reunification’ of North and SouthKorea, and so-called ‘internationalization of the Korean language’. The final part of themonograph explores future prospects of South Korea’s language policy, some of themajor issues being the status and role of English, the rise of China (and Chinese), emergentmultilingualism, and the linguistic gap between North and South Korea.

Part 1: the language profile of South Korea

The Korean language in space and time

Different hypotheses have been put forward about the genetic affiliation of the Koreanlanguage. The most persuasive one is the Altaic hypothesis, first proposed by the Finnishlinguist Gustaf John Ramstedt (1873–1959). The Altaic family has three branches:Turkic, Mongolian and Tungusic. Korean is claimed to be closer to Tungusic than to Mon-golian or to Turkic. However, the Altaic hypothesis has not been universally accepted duelargely to the lack of regular sound correspondences between Korean and Altaic languages,although similarities between Korean andAltaic languages or Proto-Altaic (i.e. the extinct orreconstructed ancestor of Altaic languages) are so strong that they simply cannot be brushedaside as being due to chance or contact alone. Attempts have also beenmade to relate Koreanto other language families such as Austronesian, Dravidian and Indo-European. But theseviews suffer from an even greater lack of evidence. Thus, it is not unfair to say that theAltaic hypothesis is accepted by more scholars than the other views (put together). Unlessmore evidence than hitherto available is produced (which is not likely), the genetic affiliationof Korean will remain far from settled or universally agreed on. Thus, many linguists regardKorean as a language isolate or a language with no known relatives.

Little can be said about the language or languages spoken by prehistoric people who firstreached the Korean Peninsula. When new waves of migration arrived from the north – withbetter technology and social organization– between 4000 and 5000 years ago, theymust have

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added to the ethnic and linguistic diversity already in place. It is not difficult to imagine thatthe Korean Peninsula had been inhabited by more than one ethnic group – hence more thanone language was spoken – in the past. Even today, all its neighbouring countries (i.e. China,Japan, Mongolia and Russia) are not free from ethnic and linguistic diversity. In all prob-ability, the Korean Peninsula would not have been any different, especially in the distant past.

Indeed Korea was not at all linguistically homogeneous as late as in the mid-seventhcentury CE, when the three kingdoms were unified by Shilla. Moreover, it is possible tosay – on the basis of extant Chinese sources – that more than one language had beenspoken on the Korean Peninsula before and at the time of the unification, i.e. Tungusicand possibly also Japanic languages (e.g. Janhunen, 1996). By the time when Koryo over-threw Unified Shilla and established its capital in Songhak (now Kaesong), the linguistichomogenization of the Korean Peninsula is said to have been completed. With the establish-ment of Yi Choson, the dialectal variety spoken in its new capital, Hanyang (now Seoul),became the linguistic norm, as it were, for Koreans. In 1912, Standard South Korean wasfirst defined officially by the Japanese colonial government as the dialect of Seoul (thenknown as Kyengseng), and, then again in 1933, by the Korean Language Society (CoseneHakhoi) as the dialectal variety of the educated middle class in Seoul. This definition wasrevised by the Ministry of Education (MOE) in 1988 as the modern Seoul dialect widelyused by educated people in and around the metropolitan area of Seoul (e.g. Choi, 2003,pp. 55–68). Standard South Korean has since been codified in such domains as education(e.g. school textbooks), government (e.g. official documents) and themassmedia (e.g. news-papers and broadcasting). But the problem with such codification is that probably few Seou-lites actually speak Standard South Korean as preserved and promoted by the governmentand the mass media. This is not difficult to understand. Languages do not remain unchangedover time, but constantly undergo changes. Korean is no exception to this. Most of thesechanges, however, take a long time, if they are accepted, to become codified in, or to findtheir way into, Standard South Korean. Moreover, the decades of migration into Seoulfrom the rest of Korea (i.e. including North Korea before and during the Korean War andthe urbanization in the 1960s and 1970s) have also contributed considerably to the dialectof Seoul. Thus Standard South Korean, albeit claimed to be based on the dialect of Seoul,may exist largely in written or abstract form, and in its spoken uses, it is probably confinedlargely to news broadcasting. Moreover, it is not uncommon to hear non-Seoulites speaking(something close to) Standard South Korean in formal domains such as work but switchingto their own regional dialects in informal domains such as home.

Relationship or contact between Korean, Japanese and Chinese

There is one language that must be discussed in the context of the history of Korean, namelyJapanese. It is almost universally accepted that there is a strong genetic relationship betweenKorean and Japanese, however remote that may be. Substantial work, albeit with methodo-logical and other unresolved problems, has been carried out in order to demonstrate thisrelationship. Linguists have indeed discovered a respectable number of shared words andregular sound correspondences that point to the genetic linkage between the two languages.Moreover, it is impossible to lose sight of many striking structural similarities between thetwo languages. Nonetheless, linguists generally agree that there is still a need to strengthenempirical support for their genetic relationship. The most significant problem may probablybe the phonological disparity between Korean and Japanese. Korean allows syllables to endwith a range of consonants. Japanese, in contrast, basically has a ‘simple’ consonant–vowelsyllable structure. Moreover, the vowel system of Korean is much more complex than that

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of Japanese. One suggestion that has been made to understand these and other differences isthat perhaps the linguistic homogenization of the Korean Peninsula took place in continu-ous contact with Tungusic languages in the north (i.e. Manchuria), and that of the JapaneseArchipelago in the midst of Ainu and other indigenous languages that had previouslymigrated from the south (perhaps Austronesian languages). In this context, the geographicaldiscontinuity between Korea and Japan (i.e. the Korea Strait and the Sea of Japan) musthave contributed to Korean and Japanese remaining in contact with structurally and geneti-cally different languages. Whatever the real linguistic history of Korean and Japanese maybe, however, there is no denying that the two languages are (genetically) closer to each otherthan to any known language(s) in the world.

One of the popular misconceptions about Korean – probably engendered byKorea’s pro-pinquity to China, not tomention physical similarities between Koreans and Chinese – is thatit is genetically related to Chinese. There is no evidence whatsoever in support of this.Chinese is a member of the Sino-Tibetan family. (One can deduce that Japanese also isgenetically unrelated to Chinese.) That said, there are many lexical and phonological simi-larities betweenKorean andChinese. There is a good reason for this, however. Chinese influ-ence on almost every aspect of Korea is enormous and pervasive, and it is no less strongly feltor reflected in the language than anywhere else. Korean has borrowed a large number ofChinese characters and words through its very long contact with Chinese. It is not just thecase that Chinese characters and words were borrowed. New words, independent ofChinese, have been created on the basis of Chinese characters. The importing into Koreanof Chinese characters and words began on a large scale during the Unified Shilla period.This practice was continued on an even larger scale in Yi Choson. The comprehensive dic-tionary of Korean (published in 1992 in South Korea), for instance, indicates that 52.1% ofthe total of 164,125 entries are Sino-Korean words (i.e. Korean words built on Chinese char-acters or elements) as opposed to pure Korean words (45.5%) and other loanwords (2.4%).To wit, the resemblance between Korean and Chinese words is due to borrowing, notcommon genetic inheritance.

The typological profile of the Korean language

The sound system in Korean comprises 19 consonants, 10 vowels and 2 semivowels. Thesyllable structure in Korean is defined by one obligatory vowel, supported by one optionalconsonant and one optional semivowel before the vowel, and one optional consonant afterthe vowel. Clusters of two consonants occur in the medial position of words. They neveroccur in the initial position of words, but they may do so in the final position of words.In word-final positions, however, only one of the two consonants is actually pronouncedwith the other omitted unless followed by a vowel. Korean is characterized as a typicalagglutinative language. Thus, words are built by the process of adding elements with con-stant form and meaning to other elements. The basic word order in Korean sentences issubject, object and verb in that order. Korean also makes use of postpositions (more accu-rately, postnominal particles) and in fact, it is regarded as a consistently head-final language(as opposed to head-initial languages such as English). Thus, many word order patterns arebased fundamentally on the ordering of dependents and heads in that order (e.g. objectbefore verb, relative clause before head noun, etc.) For emphatic or pragmatic purposes,however, the subject and object – and other elements for that matter – may change theirpositions as long as the verb stays in the final position of a sentence, i.e. in the head-final position. Role-marking or delimiting particles are used to indicate grammatical or dis-course functions of noun phrases, e.g. who does what to whom, who is being talked about

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and the like. Modifying elements appear before what they modify, i.e. dependent beforehead. Also worth mentioning is the rich honorific system. It is used to express the speaker’srespect towards the referent of the subject noun phrase. Whether the referent of the subjectnoun phrase deserves the speaker’s respect depends on the speaker’s position vis-à-vis thereferent of the subject noun phrase in terms of age and social status. The neutral-honorificdistinction is also found in nouns, and the encoding of the subject noun phrase. There is alsoa neutral-humble distinction in pronouns. Moreover, sentence enders (i.e. elements used tomake statements, ask questions, etc.) must also change, depending on the speech leveldetermined by the difference in age or social status between the speaker and the hearer.There are six different speech levels (in Standard South Korean). (For a detailed discussionof the linguistic structure of Korean, see Song, 2005.)

Sociolinguistic variation in South Korea

By the world’s standards, the correlation between Koreans and the Korean language isalmost perfect. That is, (North or South) Korean nationals speak Korean, and most speakersof Korean are (North or South) Korean nationals. In point of fact, ‘Koreans boast an evenhigher degree of congruity of speech community and nation’ than most ethnic groups inthe world (Coulmas, 1999, p. 408). This situation is in contrast with other major languagesof the world, e.g. English, Spanish or Chinese. Nor is there any indigenous language inKorea, as in the case of Japan (i.e. Ainu) or Taiwan (i.e. Austronesian languages), forexample. That said, there are, as will be discussed later, over 900,000 foreign nationalsliving in South Korea, although these numbers will probably be close to just over 1million when overstayers and illegal migrants are also taken into account. Thus SouthKorea, while largely a monolingual nation, has its own share of bilingual speakers asmany other nations in the world do. Nonetheless, South Korea can be said to be largely amonolingual nation.

Korean has regional dialectal differences. Speakers from different regions are able tounderstand one another without much difficulty. Standard South Korean and StandardNorth Korean, for instance, are not mutually unintelligible overall. There are as many asfive dialect groups in South Korea, namely, Central, Chwungcheng, Cenla, Kyengsangand Cheju. The cause of this dialectal diversity is understood to be historical and politicalas well as geographical. For instance, the Cheju dialect, spoken on the southernmost ChejuIsland (Figure 1), has been formed due to its geographical isolation from the mainland. TheKyengsang and Cenla dialects, on the other hand, may have come into existence due to theabsence of a major transport route between the two zones in the past as well as to the factthat the areas had been under the control of two different kingdoms until the mid-seventhcentury CE (a phenomenon which has, unfortunately, continued to be played out in SouthKorean society). More recently, the geopolitical division between North and South Korea –with the subsequent emergence of Standard South Korean and Standard North Korean – hasgiven rise to further differences between the northern and southern dialect groups (e.g.C.-W. Kim, 1978, 1991; Song, 2001).

Kwuke vs. Hankwuke

In South Korea, Korean is known as Kwuke ‘the national language’, but when taught to, orused by, foreigners, it is referred to as Hankwuke ‘the Korean language’ (for a comparablesituation in Japan, see Gottlieb, 2008, p. 4). Korean is currently spoken by 73 millionpeople in the Korean Peninsula (i.e. 49 million in South Korea and 24 million in North

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Korea) and also by a sizeable number of Korean migrants and their descendants living inChina (2.3 million), the USA (2.1 million), Japan (900,000), the former USSR (500,000)and, more recently, in Australia, Canada and New Zealand. In terms of the number of speak-ers, it is ranked 11th or 12th among the languages of the world. Korean, as a foreignlanguage, is not as popular as Japanese or Chinese, but it has over the past few decadesbeen adopted as a foreign language subject in a steadily growing number of countriesaround the world; for instance, in 2007 Korean was taught at the tertiary level in 64countries (Lee, 2009, p. 208). Needless to say, this is due largely to the prominent positionthat South Korea has in recent years assumed in the world’s economy. The presence ofKorean migrants and their descendants in many countries must also have contributed tothe public awareness in those countries of Korean as an important community language(e.g. Australia and the USA).

Hankul: the indigenous writing system

Koreans have had their own writing system called Hankul since the mid-fifteenth centuryCE. The name Hankul was created in 1912 to replace its then popular name, i.e. Enmwun‘vulgar writing’. The first part of the new name, han, is an archaic native Korean wordmeaning ‘great’ and the second part, kul, a native Korean word meaning ‘writing’. Themeaning of the first word, however, has been lost to many Koreans, and with han homo-phonous with another word associated with Korea or Koreanness, as in Hankwuk‘(Great) Korea’, the name Hankul is now generally understood to mean ‘Korean writing’.

In what is probably the first recorded instance of language planning and policy in Korea,Hankul was created by King Sejong (1417–1450) of Yi Choson specifically for the benefitof illiterate commoners. The dominant writing system in the Yi Choson Dynasty – mono-polized by those in power and authority – was Chinese, as it had been since the fourth- orfifth-century CE. The king, while educated in Chinese writing and classics, was so con-cerned about the lack of an easy writing system for ordinary Koreans (read: commoners)that he decided to invent one in what amounts to corpus planning. This is something extra-ordinary, never recorded elsewhere in the (pre-modern) world. The king’s intention is statedexplicitly in the preface to the book entitled Hwummincengum ‘The Correct Sounds for theInstruction of the People’ (promulgated on 9 October 1446):

The [sounds] of our country’s language are different from those of the Middle Kingdom [i.e.China] and are not confluent with [the sounds of Chinese] characters. Therefore, among the[ignorant] people, there have been many who, having something to put into words, have inthe end been unable to express their feelings. I have been distressed because of this, andhave newly designed twenty eight letters, which I wish to have everyone practice at theirease and make convenient for their daily use. [translated by Ledyard (1966)]

Before the advent of Hankul, Koreans had to draw upon Chinese characters imported fromChina. Although there had been a few attempts to adapt Chinese characters to meet theneeds of Korean (as the Japanese had done with their Hiragana and Katakana systems;see e.g. Gottlieb, 2008), the writing system of the ruling class in pre-modern Korea – i.e. until the end of the nineteenth century – was unquestionably Chinese. It must beborne in mind, however, that Koreans who were able to read and write Chinese wereunable to speak Chinese or to understand spoken Chinese. In other words, Chinese wasmerely a written language in old Korea. Moreover, Chinese characters were (and are)not read in the same way they were (and are) in Chinese. Koreans have always hadtheir own way of pronouncing Chinese characters (just as Japanese have, albeit in a

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more complicated manner). The ability to write in Chinese characters was also regarded asa true reflection of one’s social status and erudition, and was, in fact, largely the ‘property’of the ruling class (read: male members of the nobility). Not surprisingly, before the twen-tieth century the majority of Koreans were illiterate. It is not difficult to imagine that theruling class would steadfastly hold on to Chinese characters even after the invention ofHankul. Chinese writing was a symbol of social status (as it still is to an extent inpresent-day South Korea). Monarchs who contemplated any deviation or departurefrom the norms of the ruling class would be seen to jeopardize the very foundation ofthat ruling class and ultimately of the monarchy itself. Against this backdrop, KingSejong’s bold initiative in inventing the Hankul writing system must be understood andappraised. That said, it must also be pointed out that there were a number of thingstaken for granted in King Sejong’s orthographic initiative, remarkable and unprecedentedas it may be. First, there is no mention in the published (and extant) documents on Hankul(e.g. Hwunmincengum) of which variety of Korean the new writing system was based on.Presumably, it was the variety spoken by the nobility including the monarch himself. Theexistence of other dialects in Yi Choson Korea does not seem to have been recognized ortaken into account. Second, it is not clear how the new writing system was to be taught orspread to the masses (i.e. commoners and also including noble women, who were gener-ally denied access to education), when there was no public education to speak of in YiChoson (as in all the preceding dynasties). Only the (male members of the) nobilityhad access to learning, including literacy, through private schools or tutors. Third, KingSejong underestimated the deeply ingrained position of Chinese characters in YiChoson’s higher echelons. The king himself had to use his royal authority and powerto put his invention through against the opposition of the ruling class. Indeed the strugglebetween them is legendary and well documented. Eventually, Hankul was relegated to thestatus of a ‘vulgar’ writing system, used mainly by noble women and commoners, and thissituation would not change until the rise of Korean nationalism in the late nineteenthcentury. These points may suggest that King Sejong’s orthographic initiative was anexample of ‘badly’ executed corpus planning, and some may even argue that KingSejong was much of an idealist, his noble intentions notwithstanding. Nonethelessbecause of its simple but elegant structure (as explained below), his orthographic inven-tion was to earn the position that it has today in South Korea (as well as in North Korea).

The most remarkable aspect of Hankul, apart from its small set of 24 basic letters, is itsconceptual basis, as explained lucidly in the book Hwunmincengumhaylye ‘Explanationsand Examples of the Correct Sounds for the Instruction of the People’, also published in1446. There are three important things to note about the conceptual basis of Hankul.First, some of the letters, particularly consonant letters, have a strong articulatory basisin their formal design. For example, take the letter symbols for /k/ and /n/. In order toproduce /k/, the back of the tongue must be raised so that it comes in contact with thesoft palate or velum. The outline of the tongue in that position resembles the shape ofthe Hankul letter ㄱ. The sound unit of /n/, on the other hand, is produced by putting thetip or blade of the tongue against the upper front teeth. The outline of the tongue in thatposition is similar to the shape of the Hankul letter ㄴ. All this is clearly explained inthe book referred to here. Second, the articulatory orientation of Hankul is further augmen-ted by the way some of the ‘complex’ consonant and vowel letters were designed on thebasis of ‘simple’ letters. For instance, the phonetic property of aspiration was indicatedby adding a diacritic to simple letters on a consistent basis. The third point to be madeabout the conceptual basis of Hankul concerns the fact that the same consonant letterswere used regardless of whether they appear in syllable-initial or syllable-final positions.

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This may sound like an obvious point, but this seemingly simple fact was not recognized atall in the contemporary Chinese scholarly view of sound systems at the time of the inven-tion of Hankul. In addition, this point, in fact, is related to what is probably the most impor-tant or intellectual aspect of Hankul: identical symbols invoked for different phoneticrealizations of abstract sound units (i.e. the modern linguistic distinction between phonemesand allophones).

Parallel use of Hankul and Hanca

When King Sejong invented Hankul, it was not his intention to completely substitute it forHanca ‘Chinese characters’. Hanca, as the dominant writing system of Yi Choson, wouldcontinue to be used in royal or official decrees and documents as well as in noblemen’s per-sonal writings. This state of affairs, in a way, set the scene for the status and role ofHanca inpresent-day Korea, i.e. the continued parallel use of Hankul and Hanca. Their pride inHankul notwithstanding, Koreans still rely on Hanca, albeit on a decreasing scale overthe decades. In South Korea, Chinese characters are used in a wide range of contexts, e.g. newspapers, academic books and legal documents.

The use of Hanca in what is otherwise a Hankul text is illustrated in (1), with Hanca inbold face for easy reference. Compare this with the exclusive use ofHankul in (2). Due to thereduced use ofHanca in recent years, however, Chinese characters, when written, tend to bepresented in parentheses immediately after words written in Hankul, as illustrated in (3).

(1) 오늘날 우리가 말하고 있는 國國語語의 先先祖祖는 어떤 言言語語였던가.(2) 오늘날 우리가 말하고 있는 국어의 선조는 어떤 언어였던가.(3) 오늘날우리가말하고있는국어(國語)의선조(先祖)는어떤언어(言語)였던가.

There have been several attempts to adopt the Hankul-only policy (as illustrated in (2)) inSouth Korea but none has so far succeeded across-the-board. As for the reason why the useof Hanca persists, one can perhaps point to the long history of cultural contact betweenKoreans and Chinese. Some things are not easy to give up for emotional, sentimental, his-torical or even aesthetic reasons. Hanca has been with Koreans for thousands of years, andperhaps it is too difficult to get rid of something that has been around for that long. Whatmakes it even more difficult to lose Hanca completely may be that a good understanding ofHanca has always been associated with erudition and education in Korea. It is, one may say,an important status symbol. Status symbols are always sought after in South Korea, just aselsewhere in the world.

There is indeed a long-standing tug-of-war between proponents and opponents ofHanca. Since the details of this ‘confrontation’ will later be presented in the context ofSouth Korea’s language policy and national curriculum, suffice it to mention here thatthere have in the past been a good number of arguments in support of, or in oppositionto, the parallel use ofHankul andHanca. For instance, the use ofHanca is said to contributeto the disambiguation of homonyms in Korean. Thus, proponents of Hanca argue thatChinese characters, being logographic, help reduce a large number of homonyms (atleast in writing, an issue which may actually be important for newspaper headlines, aca-demic books and legal documents).3 Opponents of Hanca, in contrast, make a counterclaimthat the exclusive use of Hankul, not the (parallel) use of Hanca, would enhance Korea’scultural independence and enable Koreans to gain their own cultural self-esteem and crea-tivity. This tug-of-war is not likely to go away in the foreseeable future (see Hanca edu-cation and use, in Part 3, for further discussion). Whether the justification for Hankul

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over Hanca is nationalistic, educational, practical or otherwise, the orthographic reality inSouth Korea is that Hanca continues to be used in conjunction with Hankul, especially insocio-economically important domains (e.g. business, higher learning and law). That said,Hanca may be on its way down, if not out, for the simple reason that learning Chinesecharacters requires an excessive amount of time and effort by today’s standards (i.e.speed, efficiency and economy). More importantly, Hanca as a status symbol has alreadybegun to be eroded by English, especially among the younger generation (see theensuing discussion). A quick comparison of newspapers – which have been traditionallyregarded as major proponents/users of Hanca – between different times indicates thatthere has indeed been a substantial reduction in the use of Hanca. (Too many Chinesecharacters printed in newspapers have been known to affect their sales adversely and tobe more costly to typeset.) Nonetheless, the use of Hanca will probably not disappearcompletely into oblivion and there is every likelihood that it will even be promoted inSouth Korea, as China is rapidly gaining political and economic prominence in thatregion and the world. (This is one of the reasons why political leaders in Singapore arepromoting Mandarin Chinese, e.g. Speak Mandarin Program, after decades of promotingEnglish (e.g. see Chua, 2010).) Finally, Chinese characters used in South Korea are tra-ditional ‘full’ characters, as used in Taiwan and Hong Kong. Thus, South Koreans whocan read traditional Chinese characters may have difficulty in understanding simplifiedones currently being used in mainland China and Singapore.

English in South Korea: global English or something else?

By and large, South Korea is a monolingual country. South Korean nationals speak Korean,and most speakers of Korean are South (or North) Korean nationals. However, there are anumber of minority languages spoken on its soil, e.g. Bengali, Chinese, English, Japanese,Thai, Urdu, Uzbek, Vietnamese, etc. While the next section will address some of these min-ority languages, this section will focus on English because of its global importance andSouth Korea’s pursuit of English, probably unparalleled elsewhere in the world.

English in South Korea

South Koreans have for some years been engaging in public discourses on English as a vitalresource for their country’s economic survival in the era of globalization (e.g. J. S.-Y. Park,2009). English, a foreign language hardly or never used in everyday communication, hasbecome so important a criterion in educational assessment and performance evaluationthat South Koreans have no other option but to direct their financial resources to learningthe language, regardless of whether or not they will ever put it to use. Recently, South Koreahas witnessed a most remarkable or even bizarre phenomenon involving the status and roleof English: the so-called Official English debate –whether or not English should be adoptedas South Korea’s official language. What this public debate has demonstrated is the extentof South Korea’s pursuit of English. Indeed South Korea’s pursuit of English has beencharacterized as ‘obsession’ or ‘frenzy’ in academic circles (e.g. J. S.-Y. Park, 2009) aswell as in the media.

There is no doubt that English has been the most important foreign language in SouthKorea for the past six decades or so, and its influence can be attested not only in theKorean language itself (Baik, 1992, 1994; Moon, 2009; J. S.-Y. Park, 2009; Shim, 1994;Song, 2001, pp. 148–150, 2005, pp. 86–88 and 2011), but also in many facets of thesociety. English is regarded as important enough to be taught nationwide as a compulsory

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subject at the primary school level as from 1997; in 2008, President Myung-Bak Leeannounced his government’s plan to have all English classes in primary and secondaryschools conducted in English only by 2012; South Koreans, dissatisfied with the English-language education delivered by the school system, are reported to have spent in 20051.9% of South Korea’s GDP (or US$ 15 billion) on private English education (Chun &Choi, 2006);4 South Koreans annually spend as much as US$ 752 million on English pro-ficiency tests, with the lion’s share of this going to the Test of English as a Foreign Language(TOEFL; Educational Testing Service, USA) (Guardian Weekly, 15 December 2006); SouthKorea is the world’s largest market for TOEFL (Guardian Weekly, 15 December 2006);South Korea is one of the few countries in the world which have embraced the novel ideaof the ‘English village’ (e.g. www.english-village.or.kr), where typical life in an English-speaking country (e.g. US, UK) is replicated so that non-native speakers of English canstay for a day or a short period of time (i.e. a week or a month), interacting with hirednative speakers of English. There are reported to be 21 English villages in South Korea,with the number set to rise to 30 (AsiaOne, 5 October 2008;Guardian Weekly, 15 December2006; Joong Ang Daily, 6 September 2008; also see Trottier, 2008). Some South Koreanparents, dissatisfied with the English-language education available in the country, sendtheir school-age children – previously also preschool-age children, and probably still,albeit illegally – to Australia, Canada, New Zealand or the USA for the so-called Cokiyuhak‘early overseas education’; and last but not least, since 1998 there has been a recurrent,heated debate on English as an official language of South Korea. The last phenomenon is,to say the least, most remarkable in that English, as much a foreign language to SouthKoreans as Chinese, Japanese, Spanish, Swahili, etc., has been ‘touted’ as a possible officiallanguage in what is, to all intents and purposes, a monolingual, Korean-speaking nation.

The Official English debate: Yenge Kongyonghwa Noncayng

The importance of English was recognized officially by President Young-Sam Kim’s gov-ernment (1993–1998) within the context of South Korea’s Seykyehwa ‘internationaliza-tion’. It was not, however, until the publication in 1998 of Geo-Il Bok’s book entitledKwukcey sidayuy mincoke [Ethnic languages in the age of the international language]that the idea of English as a possible official language of South Korea was invoked andbrought into a public forum (i.e. newspaper and magazine articles, letters to newspaperand magazine editors, TV and radio broadcasts, media-instigated on-line surveys, etc.).Bok (1998) claimed that Korean – as well as other ‘ethnic languages’ for that matter –was plainly unsuitable for the new age of globalization, and it would inevitably end upas what he called a ‘museum language’ [i.e. to be studied by language specialists only].The thrust of his argument was that it will be extremely costly, even if it were possible,to access global information and knowledge through local languages such as Korean,and the lack of English proficiency, in the age of globalization, will be a serious impedimentto gaining access to global information and knowledge (crucial for economic growth).Bok’s recommendation (1998, p. 180), therefore, was that English should replace Koreanas South Korea’s official language, or that at least in a transitional phase of the officializa-tion process, English should be used along with Korean. His controversial book immedi-ately led to the pros and cons of English as an official language played out largely in themedia for the next 3 years or so (widely known in South Korea as Yenge KongyonghwaNoncayng ‘the Official English debate’). While there was considerable support, mainlyfrom a powerful, neoliberal-minded minority, for Bok’s idea, various arguments, oftenvitriolic, were also brought against it, including the loss of South Korea’s national identity;

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the ‘transportation of American market ideology into [South] Korea’; proponents beingbranded as ‘mindless buffoons suffering from toadyism’; and practical problems relatingto the transformation of Korean-speaking South Korea into an English-speaking nation.In 2000, the heated debate was fuelled by the appearance of the report Plan for theTwenty-First Century Japan, commissioned by Japanese Prime Minister Obuchi Keizo;one of the report’s recommendations was that English should be used in Japan as asecond official language so that the country could cope better with globalization than it pre-viously had. This gave rise to a feeling of urgency among some South Koreans that theirnation should not lag behind Japan – of all nations – in adopting English as an officiallanguage in meeting the challenges and requirements of globalization. Worth noting inthis context is the timing of the idea of English as an official language in both countries.The idea was floated in the wake of the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis, which adverselyaffected many Asian countries, including South Korea and Japan. The argument putforward in favour of English in the two countries was that English has proven to be ‘a criti-cal resource which would allow [such countries as South Korea and Japan] to maintain andfurther develop the economic advantage [they] had worked so hard to achieve’, and that‘English is necessary for the economic survival of [South] Korea within the context of glo-balization’ (J. S.-Y. Park, 2009, p. 58, p. 76; see Kawai, 2007, p. 37 for a virtually identicalargument used in Japan).

The idea of English as South Korea’s official language received further impetus fromPresident Dae-Jung Kim’s government’s (1998–2003) proposal to establish special econ-omic zones (SEZ), where English could be used as an official language. The genesis ofthis proposal was the previous government’s proposal to make Cheju Island (SouthKorea’s southernmost insular province; see Figure 1) a ‘Free International City’ in anattempt to attract overseas investment capital. One of the major arguments for adoptingEnglish in SEZ was the perception, among politicians and businesspeople, that foreignerswere unwilling or hesitant to invest in South Korea because of communication difficulties,which could be alleviated, if not eliminated, by the adoption of English as an officiallanguage. The idea did not take off for lack of financial support from the national govern-ment, but the Cheju provincial government went so far as to propose that English should begiven special status in official business and education, i.e. the use of English, together withKorean, in official documents; compulsory English education in primary schools; and theestablishment of English-medium schools. The proposal, however, was all but jettisonedby mid-2002 in the face of fierce opposition from many quarters of the society, includingone of the ministries of President Dae-Jung Kim’s government.

The idea of English as an official language had dissipated until it was resurrected in2005, when President Moo-Hyun Roh (2003–2008) pushed for a decentralization policy.In the same year, the Cheju provincial government, with its new Special Self-GoverningProvince status (http://english.jeju.go.kr), was quick to draw up a master plan which pro-posed the adoption of English as an official language of the Free International ChejuCity, along with tax incentives, no customs, no-visa entry, etc. The official status ofEnglish in Cheju Island would entail English, not Korean, as the medium of instructionin schools on the island (i.e. an English-immersion programme, akin to the French-immersion programme in Canada). The proposal initially seemed to be gaining some trac-tion when the Ministry of Education and Human Resources made an announcement tothe effect that ‘the officialization of English in [Cheju Island] was irrevocable’ (Moon,2009, p. 309). In the midst of strong opposition from different sections of the society,however, the proposal to make English as an official language of Cheju Island was with-drawn, and the plan to legislate for the officialization of English was scuttled. In 2007,

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there was once again, in anticipation of South Korea’s Free Trade Agreement with the USA,an attempt to revive the idea of English as an official language. With its Special Self-Governing Province status, not surprisingly, the Cheju provincial government was at theforefront of this attempt. However, so far nothing seems to have gone their way (Moon,2009, pp. 311–314), although the Cheju provincial government has recently invitedleading American, British and Canadian schools to open their campuses on the island,with one or two of them opening in 2011 and the number of such international schools pro-jected to increase to 12 by 2015 (Korea IT Times, 8 November 2010; New York Times, 22August 2010).

Global English or something else?

While it may now seem to have all but gone under the radar of the public, the idea of adopt-ing English as an official language is not unlikely to return to political leaders’ agenda or toreappear in public discourses. This probably is inevitable, as the global influence of Englishcontinues to increase in one way or another (e.g. Crystal, 2003, 2008; Graddol, 2006;Kachru, Kachru, & Nelson, 2006; Mesthrie, 2008; Mesthrie & Bhatt, 2008). There isevery indication that the importance of English will be emphasized even more in thecontext of the national curriculum (e.g. Moon, 2009; J. S.-Y. Park, 2009). For instance,in the 2009 revised national curriculum, English is no longer listed under the category offoreign languages (e.g. Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Spanish, etc.) but as a separatesubject area, i.e. Yenge ‘English’ (see English in Part 2).

While, however, it is not difficult to understand why English has assumed such animportant status in South Korean society, it is unclear as to why the whole (monolingual)nation has become ‘obsessed’ with English to the point of considering its adoption as anofficial language and spending a massive amount of time and money on (private)English-language education. There are three major views on this situation. First, thereare many who hold what may be termed the ‘survivalist’ view: proficiency in English is‘a critical resource’ required for South Korea’s economic existence in the age of globaliza-tion; South Koreans are simply doing their best to acquire such a critical resource (Bok,1998 and his followers; also J. S.-Y. Park, 2009, pp. 58, 76). Second, scholars such asJ. S.-Y. Park (2009) claim that South Korea’s obsession with English is a reflection of differ-ent ideologies or beliefs circulating widely among South Koreans. As in the first view, theimportance of English in the era of globalization is also taken to underlie South Korea’sobsession with English but in conjunction with the popular belief that South Koreans are‘bad speakers of English’ in spite of many years of learning the language at school(hence more time and money to be spent on English-language education). These two ideol-ogies, in turn, come in direct conflict with another ideology, that is, English underminingKoreanness or Korean identity (hence opposition to English as an official language). Thelast view to be mentioned (e.g. Song, 2011) is critical of the other two views in thatSouth Korea’s obsession with English does not have so much to do with global Englishas with English as a mechanism of elimination, i.e. from higher education and highlypaid (white-collar) employment – just as proficiency of Hanca was indeed such a mechan-ism of elimination in pre-modern Korea (see previous discussion) – whereby the privilegedclasses can conserve the established class structure to the disadvantage, if not detriment, ofthe other classes. Many South Koreans may send their children to private English-languageschools. Not all those parents who are able to give their children private English lessonsmay afford to send their children to (more expensive) private language schools that hirenative speakers of English. Many of those who can afford to purchase private English

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lessons may not be able to send their children to short-term English-language courses in theUSA, Canada, Australia or New Zealand. Many of those who can afford to give their chil-dren short-term overseas English courses may not be able to provide them with muchadmired early overseas education. The early-overseas-education option is ‘reserved’ forthe privileged or for parents who are desperate enough to make financial and other sacri-fices for their children. (South Korean parents are known to sell their houses in order tofinance their children’s education.) The socio-economically challenged may do their bestto give their children the best private instruction that money can buy, but the privilegedalways have the capacity to outdo them all (e.g. Park & Abelmann, 2004) – for example,the recent establishment in South Korea of private English-medium schools, one admissioncriterion of which is an extended overseas stay (read: early overseas education) (see e.g.Choi, 2004 on private English-medium schools in South Korea). The privileged classesmanage to deflect the internal cause of inequality in education from themselves to whatis external to South Korean society, i.e. English as a ‘critical resource’ in the age of globa-lization. Under this critical view, the Official English debate is a radical attempt to legiti-mize English as a mechanism of elimination with which to (con)serve the interests ofSouth Korea’s socio-economic elite. Imagine a South Korea where English is an officiallanguage to the extent that all school subjects are taught in English (as indeed recommendedby the Presidential Transition Committee in 2008; see Lee, 2010 for further discussion). Inthis English-dominated society, students who have attained the necessary level of Englishcompetence – by means of their parents’ wealth – will have (better) access to learning (andalso do well in school subjects), because as Graddol (2006, p. 120) points out correctly,‘failure to master English as a basic skill means failure in other disciplines’, and ‘successin other areas of curriculum becomes dependent on success in English’.

English-speaking community in South Korea

There are a fair number of people who speak English as their first (or only) language inSouth Korea. These native English speakers include long-term foreign residents (e.g. mis-sionaries, foreign spouses of South Koreans), business people, diplomats, journalists, pro-fessionals (e.g. professors, IT, media or legal consultants), international (exchange)students, US military personnel, and more recently, teachers of English hired by univer-sities, government agencies and private English-language schools. The Ministry ofJustice (MOJ) provides statistical information on registered foreigners (www.moj.go.kr).There are, as of December 2010, as many as 42,889 registered foreigners from Australia,Canada, New Zealand, the USA and the UK (with over 66% coming from the USAalone); there are registered foreigners from countries such as Ireland and Singapore (eachwell below 1000), where English is the first or primary language of the majority of thepopulation. There are also US military personnel (just under 30,000 in number) stationedin South Korea, although their contact with South Koreans is limited as they tend todwell in military compounds, usually having their own amenities and facilities. Underthe assumption that the majority of English-speaking residents have not taken up SouthKorean citizenship, these data may be reasonably reliable in terms of numbers ofEnglish-speaking people in South Korea. Worth noting is the fact that 22,800 (or 53%)of the registered foreigners from the above-mentioned English-speaking countries arehired as English-language teachers, who tend to stay in South Korea for no more than 1or 2 years or even for a shorter period (although there may be some ‘returnees’). Thereare also foreigners married to South Koreans. The MOJ data show that there are a totalof 4216 spouses from the English-speaking countries. However, it is not clear whether

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they are registered foreigners or nationalized South Koreans. Some of these spouses may beethnic Koreans from English-speaking countries.

Unfortunately, the South Korean government does not collect (census) data on languageuse at home. Nor have census forms ever included questions concerning ethnicity, let alonelanguage use, although there was one question box regarding nationality for foreigners atthe bottom of the 2005 census form. Undoubtedly, there are some Koreans who regularlyor actively speak English at home and/or at work (apart from the English-speakingforeigners mentioned above). With the recent emergence of global English, the questionhas indeed been raised as to the existence in South Korea of Korean–English bilingualspeakers. Baik (1992, 1994) and Shim (1994) have claimed that the use of English is preva-lent in South Korea to the extent that there is a viable Korean–English bilingual speechcommunity in the country. Their ‘evidence’ comes from TV shows and commercials,movie titles and pop songs (also see J. S. Lee, 2004, 2006). Thus, while admitting thather ‘examples […] are all from popular media […], and these cannot be used as concreteevidence for linguistic changes in everyday discourse patterns [emphasis added]’, Shim(1994, p. 226, p. 238) concludes that a Korean–English bilingual speech community inSouth Korea does exist. Calling for research into other domains (e.g. home, school,work), however, Song (1998) points out that there is insufficient evidence in support ofsuch a bilingual community in South Korea; he argues that Baik’s and Shim’s data arerepresentative of what Haarmann (1986) refers to as ‘impersonal bilingualism’, i.e. theuse of English for appealing to the public’s positive feelings, not for practical communi-cation (cf. Blommaert, 2010, pp. 29–30; Seargeant, 2009 for a similar situation inJapan). Recent research (e.g. Moon, 2009; J. S.-Y. Park 2009) lends support to Song’s pos-ition: the use of English words – let alone code-mixing and -switching – in South Korea canonly be attested to a considerably lesser extent than Baik’s and Shim’s research would leadone to believe. Thus, J. S.-Y. Park (2009, pp. 34–35) remarks:

Even though there can be no doubt that influence of English on Korean society has beengrowing over the past several decades, Baik[’s] and Shim’s characterization of the Koreansociolinguistic situation can be misleading. […] More than a decade after Baik[’s] andShim’s writings, Korea’s pursuit of English has intensified even more than what they have[sic] described, but it still remains true that active usage of English is more or less containedwithin specific linguistic domains such as popular culture, rather than spreading further todominate all aspects of Korean language use.5

The ineluctable conclusion is that Baik’s and Shim’s position is untenable. While there maybe some Korean–English bilingual speakers, South Korea cannot be characterized as havinga Korean–English bilingual speech community. Put differently, South Korea may havesome individual Korean–English bilingual speakers, but the nation as a whole cannot beregarded as exhibiting societal Korean–English bilingualism.

Other minority languages

There are other minority languages spoken in South Korea, some introduced through his-torical alliance or connection, e.g. Chinese and Japanese (and recently, English, as alreadydiscussed in the preceding section), and others brought into the country by (mainlyunskilled) migrant workers and foreign brides since the late 1980s. Once again, there areno census data available on language use (at home), and available census data onforeigners’ nationalities are not as reliable as the MOJ data because not everyone fillsout a census form but foreigners are required to register with the MOJ to gain a valid

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visa or residence permit. The total number of registered foreign residents in South Koreacomes to 918,917 as of December, 2010. Table 1 provides a list of 17 countries withover 5000 residents each.

The number of foreign residents should go up slightly higher (probably just over onemillion) when illegal migrants and overstayers (i.e. residents with expired visas) are alsotaken into account (e.g. as many as 180,000 overstayers were reported in 2010). To wit,around 2% of South Korea’s population are of foreign origins, i.e. speakers of languagesother than Korean. By the world’s standards, therefore, there is a relatively small fractionof society whose first or native language is not the national language. Some foreign resi-dents originate from countries where the national language may not be everyone’s firstlanguage, e.g. Bangladesh, China, Indonesia, Nepal, Pakistan and Philippines. Thus,there must be more minority languages spoken by South Korea’s foreign residents thanthe nationalities in Table 1 may suggest. While all this is clear evidence for the existencein South Korea of multiple minority languages, the majority of these registered residentforeigners, especially from developing countries, are transient (unskilled) migrantworkers who normally return home after 2 or 3 years (e.g. W. B. Kim, 2004). Thus, itremains to be seen whether such migrant workers will be able to establish sustainableminority-language communities in South Korea. Moreover, where migrant workers comefrom depends largely on the economic circumstances of their home countries, and asliving standards improve in their own countries, migrant workers may not ‘return’, replacedby those from other countries. Thus, the distribution of resident foreigners’ nationalities inTable 1 is likely to change over time.

There are also 141,654 foreign spouses in total as of December 2010, as shown inTable 2. The MOJ data do not include nationalized spouses; how many of those thereare cannot be determined from the available data. Note that only the countries whichhave provided over 1000 spouses to South Koreans are listed in Table 2.

Somewhat surprisingly, the MOJ data reveal that the majority of these foreign spouses(i.e. 129,647) are on a resident’s visa, whereas the remaining 12,007 are placed under the‘permanent residency’ category. Whether this is an indication of foreign spouses’ lack ofcommitment to South Korea or of the South Korean government’s reluctance to grant

Table 1. Foreign residents in South Korea, December 2010.

1. China (Korean descent) 366,1542. China 139,2613. Vietnam 98,2254. Philippines 39,5255. USA 28,6436. Thailand 27,5727. Indonesia 27,4478. Mongolia 21,7759. Taiwan 21,49010. Uzbekistan 20,76611. Japan 19,44812. Sri Lanka 17,36913. Cambodia 11,67214. Bangladesh 931715. Nepal 920816. Pakistan 832817. Canada 7301

Source: Ministry of Justice, www.moj.go.kr.

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permanent residency cannot be determined from the available data. The majority of foreignspouses also come from the so-called developing countries. In fact, there has for some timebeen a severe shortage of South Korean women willing to marry rural South Korean men,especially farmers and fishermen, who have looked to other countries for their marriagepartners. Countries such as Cambodia, China, Mongolia, Philippines, Thailand, Uzbekistanand Vietnam have indeed provided rural South Korean bachelors – and increasingly in therecent years, urban South Korean bachelors as well – with foreign brides for some years(e.g. A. E. Kim, 2009). Indeed almost 87% of the registered 141,654 foreign spouses arefemales, with only 18,561 males. Not surprisingly, almost 58% of the foreign spousesreside outside the seven major cities (Inchon, Kwangju, Pusan, Seoul, Taegu, Taejon andUlsan), i.e. in rural South Korea. What this suggests is that although there may be a fairnumber of foreign spouses in South Korea, they tend to be scattered throughout ruralSouth Korea. Where they live in small numbers, they may not be able to form a sizablespeech community. Thus, while they may be able to pass their first language, be itKhmer, Vietnamese or Uzbek, on to their offspring, it remains to be seen whether theseminority languages will be maintained beyond the first or second generation. Furtherdiscussion of this issue will be provided in Part 4.

Two minority languages deserve some detailed discussion, i.e. Chinese and Japanese.These two languages were introduced into (South) Korea because of its long historical con-nections with China and Japan. South Korea, well before the large-scale arrival of Chinese(of both Korean and Chinese descent) in the late 1980s, had already had a small number ofChinese speakers living among its population. These people are commonly known in SouthKorea as Hwakyo ‘overseas Chinese’ (or Huaqiao in Mandarin Chinese). Hwakyo arrivedin Korea at the turn of the last century, mainly from the Shandong region (i.e. north-easternChina, unlike Huaqiao in other parts of the world, who originated from southern parts ofChina), and used to represent the single largest ethnic minority in (South) Korea (withthe exception of Japanese during the Japanese occupation) (Rhee, 2009, p. 113). In1942, their number peaked at 82,661, but dwindled over the years to 22,118 in 2006(Rhee, 2009, pp. 122, 117). The latest MOJ data (as of December 2010) show that thereare only 11,560 Hwakyo. The majority of Hwakyo (or 98%) hold Taiwanese passports(Rhee, 2009, p. 117). What this means is that almost 54% of the 21,490 registered Taiwa-nese (Table 1) may be Hwakyo, not Taiwanese. Moreover, Rhee (2009, p. 116) reports thatonly 18,000 out of the 21,806 Hwakyo registered with the MOJ in 2005 actually lived inSouth Korea. Thus, there may at present be an even smaller number of Hwakyo residing

Table 2. Foreign spouses in South Korea, December 2010.

1. Vietnam 35,3552. China 35,0233. China (Korean descent) 31,6644. Japan 10,4515. Philippines 74766. Cambodia 41957. Thailand 25338. Mongolia 24219. USA 217710. Uzbekistan 172511. Russia 116112. Canada 1076

Source: Ministry of Justice, www.moj.go.kr.

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in South Korea. The number of Hwakyo is likely to decrease even further as they migrate toTaiwan or theWest, or marry South Koreans, as they have done over the years. Nonetheless,Hwakyo have operated their own Chinese-medium primary and secondary schools in(South) Korea since 1902, when they established the first Hwakyo (or foreign) school inInchon City (Choi, 2001, p. 82). Choi (2001, p. 87) reports that at the time of herwriting, there were 28 primary Hwakyo schools and four Hwakyo high schools in SouthKorea. This high number of Chinese schools is remarkable given the small size of theHwakyo population. Thus, education has played an important role in the Hwakyo commu-nity’s maintenance of Mandarin. (Note that most Hwakyo speak a northern variety of Man-darin, which is spoken in the Shandong region; cf. Norman, 1988, p. 191.) That said, thecultural and linguistic heritage of Hwakyo has come under serious threat, because of theshrinking Hwakyo population, increasingly popular intermarriages, especially betweenHwakyo men and South Korean women, and Hwakyo assimilation into South Koreansociety, which has recently started to embrace them more favourably than before (Choi,2001). For instance, over 80% of Hwakyo first graders spoke no Chinese at all whenthey entered school, and about half of the first graders in Hwakyo primary schools werereported to have South Korean mothers when Choi (2001, pp. 105, 125) conducted herresearch in the late 1990s. More and more Hwakyo students, upon graduation fromHwakyo high schools, also choose South Korean universities over traditionally preferredTaiwanese ones (Choi, 2001, p. 113).

Since the late 1980s, there has been a large influx of migrant workers, both legal andillegal, from China, and as shown in Table 1, they indeed constitute the majority of(unskilled) migrant workers in South Korea. While these new Chinese migrants (andforeign brides) may speak Chinese dialects other than Mandarin, it is not unreasonableto assume that most of them also speak Mandarin (to varying degrees). Thus, there is areasonably sized Mandarin-speaking community in South Korea at the moment. (Unfortu-nately, there is no study done on Chinese dialects spoken by new Chinese migrants and theirrespective numbers.) To wit, Mandarin constitutes the largest minority language in SouthKorea in terms of numbers of speakers.

Japanese is not a widely spoken minority language in South Korea. This may come as asurprise, in view of South Korea’s propinquity to Japan, and the presence of almost onemillion Koreans in Japan (e.g. Gottlieb, 2008, pp. 30–31). But then there has been a lingeringill feeling among South Koreans over Japan’s occupation of Korea (1910–1945), althoughJapanese has long been the second most popular foreign language, after English, in SouthKorean secondary schools (see Table 9). There are only 19,448 Japanese nationals residingin South Korea, with 10,451 of these Japanese nationals married to South Koreans (MOJ,December 2010). There is one Japanese school in Seoul, providing Japanese childrenwith kindergarten, primary and middle school education – there is also a very small Japaneseschool in Pusan (with 39 students enrolled as of July 2011). There may also be some SouthKoreans who regularly speak Japanese at work (e.g. employees of Japanese companiesoperating in South Korea or South Koreans working in the tourism industry). Thus, thereis a relatively small Japanese-speaking community, mainly consisting of Japanese spousesmarried to South Koreans and Japanese nationals, in South Korea. This was not the casein the not too distant past, however. The Japanese colonial government (1910–1945)placed a ban on (the use of) Korean to the extent that Japanese was promoted in all areas oflife (for Japanese colonial language policy in Korea and Taiwan, see Tsurumi (1984) andRhee (1992). As a direct consequence, South Koreans who received Japanese-mediumschool education during the Japanese occupation were reasonably competent speakers ofJapanese, and until not long ago, it was not uncommon for some South Korean parents to

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speak to each other in Japanese when discussing private matters in the presence of theirchildren – albeit not in public, as things Japanese had been stigmatized until 1998 whenSouth Korea’s ban on ‘Japanese cultural imports’ began to be lifted – and many such SouthKoreans were also able to, and were observed to, read Japanese competently (i.e. withoutusing a Japanese–Korean dictionary). However, such Korean–Japanese bilingual SouthKoreans are no longer common or more accurately, they constitute a dying breed.

Korean and other languages in the print, mass and digital media

Together with education (as discussed in Part 2), mass communication, in different forms,plays an increasingly important role in maintaining codified language norms at ortho-graphic, grammatical and lexical levels, including the Standard South Korean accent(Kaplan & Baldauf, 1997, pp. 39–43 on codification; also Garvin, 1972, pp. 31–32 onthe role of mass communication). With 98% of South Korea’s population being (native)South Koreans, it comes as no surprise that Korean, as the national language, is also thepredominant language of mass communication, although other (minority) languages suchas English, Chinese and Japanese are also utilized, albeit on a considerably smaller scale,for the benefit of foreign residents and international audiences (e.g. visitors). Three maintypes of mass communication will in turn be discussed here: print, mass and digital media.

Print media

In 2007, there were 29,977 publishers, 2042 bookstores and 607 libraries (retrieved fromthe Korean Publishers Association at www.kpa21.or.kr). There are also as many as fivemajor online bookstores, started to appear in 1999 in competition with conventional or‘offline’ bookstores, e.g. YES25, Kyobo Online Store (Korea Times 21 July 2008; Publish-ers Weekly, 27 August 2001). In 2007, more than 132.5 million copies or 41,094 titles (i.e.first editions only) were printed. Book sales for 2001 amounted to US$ 1.9 billion (Yang,2004, p. 37). While a number of publishers and bookstores went bankrupt or experiencedfinancial difficulties in the wake of the Asian Financial Crisis, publishing and printingremain major industries in South Korea. Indeed South Korea is said to be among the top10 book markets in the world (Sonne-Nijhoff, 2005, p. 64). One of the major reasonswhy South Korean publishers (and bookstores) managed to weather the tough economictimes relatively well is said to be South Korean parents’ zeal for their children’s learningand education (Park, 2005, p. 59; Sonne-Nijhoff, 2005, pp. 62–63; Yang, 2004, p. 40).South Korean parents’ interest in education is well reflected in their willingness to investheavily in their children’s education, e.g. purchasing books and learning materials, increas-ingly more in the area of early child education (i.e. preschool). During the Asian FinancialCrisis, in fact, the sales of children’s books actually increased whereas the sales of adulttitles decreased. This is why South Korea’s book industry has been placing more emphasison ‘educational’ titles, especially English-language learning materials and edu-comics(comic books with educational themes; e.g. the talk of South Korea’s publishing industryin 2005 was Magic One Thousand Characters, which explains 1000 basic Chinese charac-ters in comic strips) (Publishers Weekly, 2 March 2009).

Moreover, translated books play a significant role in South Korea’s book trade. Forinstance, about 30% of all titles published in 2004 were foreign books translated intoKorean, with Japanese Manga (‘comic’) books accounting for the lion’s share (3600titles), and with children’s books (2048 titles), literature and fiction (1749 titles) and non-fiction (849 titles) making up the remaining (Park, 2005, p. 57). This made South Korea

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(together with the CzechRepublic) theworld’s leader in book translations in 2004 (LanguageTranslation, Inc., 18 April 2007). In fact, a South Korean publisher was the first in Asia totranslate and publish the internationally successfulHarry Potter series, and owing to its enor-mous success, became, literally overnight, one of the top five publishing houses in the wholecountry (Publishers Weekly, 27 August 2001). Traditionally, Chinese and Japanese books(e.g. Chinese classics and novels, academic and technical books in Japanese) have been trans-lated into Korean, but it is correct to say more books are now translated from English andJapanese into Korean than from other languages including Chinese, although at thepresent time Japanese-to-Korean translation seems to be confined largely to one particulargenre, i.e. Manga comics. For instance, South Korea’s 11 bestsellers in 2003, as listed inYang (2004, p. 39), are all translated from English into Korean.

Moreover, South Korea imports a large volume of books, newspapers, magazines, chil-dren’s picture books, etc. from other countries (Korea Customs Service at www.customs.go.kr). In 2010, books and other printed materials imported from four English-speakingcountries (i.e. Australia, Canada, the UK and the USA) amounted to almost US$ 158million (75.5% of this total attributed to the USA, which makes that country SouthKorea’s largest supplier of imported books). The second largest supplier was Japan (US$69 million). Other major countries from which South Korea imported books and printedmaterials in 2010 were China, Germany, Russia and France (i.e. US$ 39.9 million, US$11.8 million, US$ 4.9 million and US$ 3.5 million, respectively).6 Though books andprinted materials imported from these countries may not necessarily be printed in theirrespective national languages, it can be safely assumed that the majority of them are. Whatthis means is that books and other printed materials imported by South Korea are writtenin English, Japanese, Chinese,German, Russian and French in that descending order of quan-tity. Because of South Korean parents’ eagerness to expose their children to English as earlyas possible, English children’s books are imported in increasingly large numbers, with theemergence of special bookstores selling only imported English books (Yang, 2004, p. 40).South Korea also sells book copyrights (e.g. 1477 titles in 2010, as opposed to 20 in 2001)mainly to China and other Asian countries (KBS-World, 7 March 2011). This substantialincrease is due largely to the recent popularity in these Asian countries of South KoreanTV serials, pop songs and other cultural items (i.e. so-called Hanlyu ‘Korean Wave’).

While it is true that South Koreans, like many other people in the world, may now spendless time than before on reading books because of the widely available digital forms ofleisure or entertainment (e.g. the Internet, (hand-held) computer games, mobile phones), asurvey conducted by the Korean Publishing Research Institute in 2002 indicates thatalthough an average adult’s Internet usage increased from 9 to 70 min a day, the amountof time spent on reading books decreased from 40 to 31 min a day, with the amount oftime spent on watching TV or reading newspapers more substantially reduced (J. Park,2005, p. 60). The survey also revealed that the second largest portion of South Koreans’so-called ‘cultural expenses’ went to books and magazines (i.e. 14.8%, as opposed to17.7% on movie tickets). In a more recent nation-wide survey involving 7033 people, theNational Institute of the Korean Language (NIKL, 2008) reported that 42.7% of those sur-veyed never read books, 34.7% read one book, 16% read two or three books, 3.7% read fouror five books, and 2.8% read over six books per month on average. The same report alsorevealed that more South Koreans read newspapers than books, since only 28.9% of thosesurveyed never read newspapers, whereas 39.7% spend less than 30 min on reading news-papers, 24.4% between 30 min and an hour, 5.4% between 1 and 2 h, 1.4% over 2 h per dayon average (0.2% did not reply). The report also discovered that on average, 20.8% spendmore than 2 h or 56.5% spend more than 30 min per day on the Internet, while 29.6%

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never use the Internet. Moreover, the South Korean government is actively involved inpromoting reading among its citizens. For instance, so-called ‘subway libraries’ werelaunched in 2002, along with ‘reading plazas’ at selected subway stations, with booksdonated from major bookstores, not to mention several TV programmes promoting theimportance of reading (Publishers Weekly, 28 July 2003). Another significant developmentthat highlights the importance of publishing and printing in South Korea is the recent estab-lishment of Paju Book City (www.pajubookcity.org), a purpose-built industrial zone (30 kmnorth of Seoul), devoted to the planning, production and distribution of books.

South Korea boasts of its highly literate population, i.e. 97.9% in 2002 (CIA WorldFactbook, 2009) or 98.3% (retrieved from the NIKL at www.korean.go.kr on 15 April2011), as evidenced by the size of its publishing and printing industries and of theiroutputs. This is not surprising in view of South Koreans’ dedication to education. Aspointed out on more than one occasion, South Korean parents do not hesitate to investheavily in their children’s education, more often than not, beyond their financial means.7

Thus, many South Korean children may not read for enjoyment or personal developmentbut are more likely to read for education purposes (more accurately, in order to scorehighly on examinations), e.g. learning English, mathematics, basic Chinese characters,etc. (see Seth, 2002 on South Korea’s education system described aptly as Sihem Ciok‘exam hell’). Moreover, South Korean parents’ investment in their children’s educationstarts very early (i.e. when the latter are only 2 or 3 years old). What this may mean isthat while South Korean parents’ intention may seem to many outsiders to be somewhatmisplaced, South Korean children may be exposed to literacy (whether in Korean orEnglish), among other academic skills, much earlier than children in many parts of theworld (also see Korean: Kwuke ‘the National Language’ (Part 2)). For this reasonalone, publishing and reading remain crucial elements in South Korea’s language profile(cf. Gottlieb, 2008, pp. 12–14 for a similar situation in Japan).

Mass media

Newspapers, regardless of whether they are national, regional or local, are well known toadhere to codified language norms, and South Korean mass media are no exception tothis generalization (cf. Bowers, 1968 on the role of newspapers in language codification).Circulated newspapers occupy a prominent place in South Korea’s language profile. In2009, there were 136 daily newspapers with an aggregate circulation of over 12 millioncopies (the Korean Association of Newspapers at www.presskorea.or.kr). South Koreahas three daily newspapers among the top 20 of the world’s most widely circulated news-papers (the World Association of Newspapers at www.wan-press.org). In 2009, SouthKorea printed 325.5 newspaper copies per 1000 people, well above comparable practicein the UK (307.3 copies), Germany (283.1 copies) and the USA (200.3 copies). MajorSouth Korean newspaper companies also produce daily newspapers for primary andmiddle school children. There are also a large number of monthly magazines for children,pubescent and adult readers, especially female readers in the last group. The majority of theSouth Korean newspapers are published in Korean only, although three major nationalnewspapers (i.e. Choson Ilbo, Donga Ilbo, Joong Ang Ilbo) publish in English, Chineseand Japanese as well as in Korean. There are three English-language daily newspapers,i.e. Korea Herald, Korea Times and Seoul Times. Ajou Sinmwun (renamed Ajou Kyengcay)started initially as a Chinese-language daily newspaper, but now publishes in Korean,Chinese, English and Japanese. Jeju Weekly, based in Cheju Island, publishes in bothEnglish and Chinese. There are also non-mainstream Chinese newspapers, i.e. published

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for the local Chinese-speaking community. For instance, Hwakyo had consistently pro-duced their own Chinese-language daily newspaper, i.e. Hancwung Ilbo, since the late1940s until it was terminated around 2007. There seems to be a Chinese-languageweekly newspaper (i.e. Hua Guang Bao) catering for ‘new’ migrant workers from China(the Information Center, Korea Specialized Newspapers Association at www.kosna.or.kr). Moreover, one of China’s major newspapers, Renmin Ribao, publishes its overseasedition in South Korea. There are also small community ‘newspapers’ published inKorean as well as in minority languages. There are small Chinese-language community‘newspapers’ in circulation (J.-t. Song, personal communication), as indeed is the case inmany parts of the world where Chinese live and work in large numbers (e.g. Australia,Canada, New Zealand, the UK and the USA), although exactly how many there are isnot known. These community newspapers may not be newspapers in the strictest senseof the word but may better be classified as bulletins dealing mainly with local communitynews, business, employment or personal advertisements.

As is the case with newspapers, Korean is also the predominant language of broadcast-ing on South Korea’s large number of TVand radio stations. South Korea had a total of 448broadcasters as of December 2009 (Korea Communications Commission, 2010, p. 55).Among these, there were 54 terrestrial broadcasters, 21 of which were radio-only stations.In addition, there were 199 cable and two satellite broadcasters as well as several DigitalMultimedia Broadcasting organizations (i.e. both S-DMB and T-DMB) and Internet Proto-col TVoperators. In 2009, there were three English-language terrestrial stations, i.e. ArirangTV/Radio network and two regional English-language FM stations (based in Pusan andKwangju cities). In particular, Arirang TV/Radio has three channels, i.e. Arirang Korea(for South Korea), Arirang Arab (for the Middle East) and Arirang World (for the rest ofthe world), and their main TV programmes are broadcast with Arabic, Chinese, Indonesian,Russian, Spanish and Vietnamese subtitles. South Korean terrestrial TV stations normallyhave foreign TV serials and movies (mainly from the USA and the UK) dubbed in Koreanand screened with Korean subtitles, respectively. All foreign films are screened in cinemasor movie theatres with Korean subtitles, as they have always been in the past. There is also aUS military TV/radio station (i.e. American Forces Network Korea), which has been inoperation since 1950 for the benefit of US soldiers stationed in South Korea, and in thepast (i.e. prior to the advent of satellite TV) many South Koreans tuned to this station inorder to improve their (listening) skills in English.

Digital media

South Korea is regarded as one of the most wired – if not the most wired – country in theworld. In June 2010, for instance, 81.1% of South Korea’s population were Internet users(Korea Times, 20 January 2011). With 49 million people (or just over 0.7% of theworld’s population), South Korea is ranked seventh in terms of numbers of unique IPaddresses (Akamai, 2011). Moreover, South Korea leads the rest of the world in averageInternet connection speed (i.e. in excess of 10 Mps), with 11 of its cities occupying thetop 11 positions among the world’s cities (Akamai, 2011). Not unexpectedly, SouthKorea is also ranked first in the world, at 72%, in terms of high broadband adoption, withJapan, ranked second, trailing behind at 60%.8 Indeed the International TelecommunicationUnion identifies South Korea as having the world’s highest Digital Opportunity Index in2007.9 There also exist a large number of so-called PC Pang ‘Internet cafés’, some22,000 in 2008 (Korea Times, 20 January 2011). Thus, the Internet is probably more acces-sible in South Korea than it is anywhere else in the world. Access to the Internet, and

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especially to the web, in South Korea is largely through the national language. Digital infor-mation is produced, stored and retrieved primarily in Korean, as in the case of the print andmass media. In fact, in 2010 Korean ranked 10th among the world’s 10 most used languagesin the Internet (the World Internet Statistics at www.internetworldstats.com). There is also avery high number of mobile phones in South Korea, over 50 million units as of September2010, i.e. a slightly larger number than the country’s population (Korea Times, 20 January2011). A number of major contributing factors apply here. First,Hankul, the Korean writingsystem being alphabetically based, was much easier to reproduce electronically, on the stan-dard QWERTY keyboard, than the logographically based orthographies of Chinese andJapanese. South Koreans do emailing and texting in Hankul as efficiently and effortlesslyas people do in English. Second, South Korea is basically a monolingual country, notwith-standing a recently growing number of speakers of other languages on its soil. In otherwords, there was no reason, practical or otherwise, to use a language or languages otherthan the national language when it came to Internet usage, emailing or texting. Third,South Korea enjoys one of the world’s largest publishing industries, coupled with a thrivingdomestic market for translated books and reading materials. This means that there is alreadya massive amount of information and knowledge available in Korean for digitization orInternet storage and retrieval. Last but not least, there has been a serious amount of effortand money invested by the South Korean government – beginning in the mid-1990s or inthe wake of the Asian Financial Crisis – in the country’s information and telecommunica-tions infrastructure and technology,10 one of the consequences being not only very afford-able access to the computer and the Internet but also an early entry into the market oflocal Korean-based Internet service providers such as Naver, Daum and Nate. Global Inter-net service providers such as Google and Yahoo also provide a range of Korean-language-based Internet services (e.g. email, search engine, blogging, etc.), but in South Korea theypale in comparison with the South Korean competitors in terms of market share. To wit,South Korea’s national language has a highly visible online presence.

This, however, does not mean that other languages are excluded from the Internet or theweb in South Korea. For instance, South Korean universities have their websites availablenot only in Korean but also in English. Many universities even have links to Chinese and/orJapanese versions. Both Korean and English are used in major business websites (e.g.Hyundai, LG and Samsung) as well as in cultural websites (e.g. the National Museum ofKorea and the National Museum of Contemporary Art). National, municipal, provincialand local government websites are not very different in this respect. Most of the governmentministries (e.g. Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism, MOE, Science and Technology,Ministry of Employment and Labor, Ministry of National Defence) have Korean andEnglish websites (but in the case of the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism, also web-sites in Chinese, Japanese, Spanish and Vietnamese). Eight of the nine provincial govern-ments have their websites accessible in Korean, Chinese, English and Japanese, and theremaining one in these languages as well as in Russian. The Seoul and Pusan MunicipalGovernments also operate a multilingual website (i.e. the former in Korean, Chinese,French, Japanese and Spanish, and the latter in Korean, Chinese, Japanese, Filipino andVietnamese). Presumably, these multilingual websites are designed to be useful not onlyto foreign residents but also to overseas visitors, since there are not many Japanese orFrench nationals residing in South Korea (e.g. only 2009 French residents as of December2010). Moreover, district governments too operate their own multilingual websites, most ofthem in Korean, Chinese and Japanese, but a few also in other languages such as French,Russian and Vietnamese (e.g. Seoul is divided into 25 districts).11 That said, some of thesedistrict government-level non-Korean websites provide only basic information, often with

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links to additional foreign-language information broken or not working, to the point of theirusefulness to foreign residents or visitors being called into question. In terms of content,some of them also seem to be more interested in their own promotion than in theirservice to foreign residents.

Part 2: language spread through the education system

Education plays a far more important role than mass communication in the spread of thenational language and of other languages deemed important for the welfare and develop-ment of the nation (e.g. Kaplan & Baldauf, 1997, p. 123). Indeed it is the importance ofeducation in language spread that motivated Cooper (1989, pp. 33, 157–163) to proposeacquisition planning in addition to Kloss’s (1968) status and corpus planning. SouthKorea is no exception in terms of the role of education in language spread becauseschool education has been under the complete, strict control of the national government– i.e. the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology (MEST; previously known asthe Ministry of Education, and then as the Ministry of Education and Human Resources)– in a wide range of areas from what subjects are to be taught to who can be hired as tea-chers to who will be allowed to write textbooks (cf. Yoon, 2009). To borrow Kaplan andBaldauf’s words (1997, p. 123), in South Korea the education sector – under the watchfuleyes of the national government – is the ‘transmitter and perpetuator’ of the standard normsof the national language.

The education system in South Korea follows a single-track 6-3-3-4 pattern, that is, 6years of primary school, 3 years of middle school, 3 years of high school and 4 years oftertiary education (the last component with a 2-year junior or technical college option).12

Primary school education is compulsory and has been free since 1979.13 Middle schooleducation, also compulsory, is in the process of gradually becoming free nationwide,initially in rural farming or fishing areas in 1985. While high-school education is neithercompulsory nor free, the retention rate at this level (middle to high) is not at all behindthat at the middle school level (primary to middle), i.e. almost 100%, as can be seen inTable 3.

In 2010, South Korea had 5854 primary schools with almost 3.3 million students, 3130middle schools with almost two million students, 2253 high schools with almost twomillion students, and 411 tertiary education providers – 220 of which are universities –

with over 3.6 million tertiary students (MEST & KEDI, 2010, pp. 20, 31). Thus as of2010, almost 22% of South Korea’s population was enrolled in the nation’s largenetwork of educational institutions. Moreover, South Korean students perform very wellby the world’s academic standards. For instance, the Performance of InternationalStudent Assessment 2009 report shows that South Korea is ranked second in reading,fourth in mathematics and sixth in science in the world’s countries/economies (OECD,2010). That said, it has also been reported that in general, South Korean students are nothappy with school (e.g. Kim, Cho, Yoon, & Jin, 2004). This is most probably due to the

Table 3. Retention rates at different levels (MEST & KEDI, 2010).

2006 (%) 2007 (%) 2008 (%) 2009 (%) 2010 (%)

Primary to middle 99.9 99.9 99.9 99.9 99.9Middle to high 99.8 99.6 99.7 99.6 99.7High to tertiary 82.1 82.8 83.8 81.9 79.0

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excessive number of examinations that students are required to sit, and also the high numberof school subjects that students have to complete per semester (i.e. 10–13 subjects; but seethe ensuing discussion).

South Korea has a national curriculum, developed, standardized and implemented bythe MEST in conjunction with the Korean Educational Development Institute (KEDI).The national curriculum had undergone revision on a periodic basis since its initial promul-gation in 1954/1955 (less than a year after the end of the Korean War). The last periodic (orseventh) revision took place in 1997 and had since been implemented until 2005 when theMEST opted for an ‘on-demand’ curriculum revision system, within which both evaluationand required revision are carried out whenever there is a need for curriculum changes.Under this new ‘on-demand’ revision system, the national curriculum has already been sub-jected to revision twice, i.e. in 2007 and 2009, the latter revised curriculum being in theprocess of progressive implementation to 2013.

The overarching objective of the national curriculum is to foster the ideal of HongikInkan (i.e. men and women contributing to the benefit of mankind), which is thought tobe the ‘foundation spirit of the first Korean kingdom’ (Yoon, 2009, p. 119; MEST,2009a, p. 1). Under this educational ideal, all Korean citizens will learn to develop theirindividual character and to acquire not only the ability to become independent beingsbut also the necessary attributes of a democratic citizen in order to lead a worthy life andto contribute to the development of a democratic nation as well as to the prosperity of allhumankind (MEST, 2009a, p. 1; cf. Yoon, 2009, p. 119). This ideal objective is augmentedby more specific aims, one of which is, in view of the emergence of a rapidly globalizingworld, to enable South Koreans to contribute to the development of ‘the one [global?] com-munity’, as citizens who are able to communicate or connect with the world, in the spirit ofcaring and sharing (MEST, 2009a, p. 1).

In the rest of Part 2, how thenational language is taught and assessed at theprimary,middleandhigh-school levels is discussed.Also addressed is how the education systemdealswith theteaching of English and other foreign languages, namely the seven foreign languages offeredas electives in high schools. While not delivered as a language subject per se, Hanca (i.e.Chinese characters) education deserves some discussion as well, because of its traditionalimportance in South Korea’s education system and also because of its continued use inSouth Korea. Finally, how Korean is taught as a second or foreign language (i.e. Hankwuke,as opposed to Kwuke, spoken by South Koreans themselves) within as well as outside SouthKorea is addressed.Hankwuke, as taught in South Korea, is targeted at non-Korean-speakingforeign residents, especiallymigrantworkers, foreign brides and international students.Whentaught outside South Korea, Hankwuke is promoted, as part of South Korea’s drive for thespread of theKorean language, to other countries, especially in Asia, and also taught as a heri-tage language to Korean descendants in Australia, Canada, Central Asia (or precisely, theCIS), New Zealand, the UK and the USA among others.

Korean: Kwuke ‘the national language’

The overall objective of the national curriculum in Kwuke ‘the national language’ is toenable students to develop the ability to use Korean correctly and effectively as well asthe right attitude towards the correct and effective use of the language (MEST, 2007,p. 26). This objective is to be achieved by emphasizing acquisition of listening, speaking,reading and writing skills in natural contexts so that students’ critical and creative compe-tence in the national language can be improved (MEST, 2007, p. 26). Regardless of schoollevels, the national curriculum in Kwuke has three focus areas (or six core areas) (MEST,

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2007, pp. 28–90). First, in the four main language activities (i.e. listening, speaking, readingand writing), students learn to perform the following functions of language, i.e. communi-cative, persuasive, interactive and expressive. For instance, students read persuasivematerials while they write persuasive texts. The second focus is grammar ranging from pho-nemes to words to sentences to texts and discourses. The last focus concerns ‘literature’consisting of poems, novels/stories, theatre/drama/movies and essays/critiques. Thesethree focus areas are introduced incrementally over the primary, middle and high-schoollevels.

The national curriculum at the primary school level could not be more explicit on theimportance of the national language when it states that one of the main learning outcomesat this level is to enable students to extend their correct use of the language by providingthem with lessons and, if necessary, additional or remedial programmes, in the core areas(e.g. reading, writing, etc.) (MEST, 2009a, p. 5); through language ‘activities’, studentswill also be able to achieve enhanced cognition and imagination. As can be seen fromTable 4 (MEST, 2009a, p. 4), the highest number of contact periods is indeed allocatedto Korean, almost twice as many as most of the other subject areas.

While a great deal of emphasis, conceptual and practical, is placed on the four mainlanguage activities, it must be borne in mind that in South Korea many children mayalready have developed the ability to read and write Hankul by the time they enterprimary school. For instance, Chung and Koo (2001) report that 93% of Korean childrenbetween the ages of four and six read books with parents or grandparents, and 7% ofthem also receive assistance in reading from their older siblings (G.-l. Lee, 2002, p. 1).Similarly, Choi (1986) reports that almost 90% of over 2000 preschool children interviewedin his study had been given lessons in Hankul by their parents at home. His study alsoshows that one-third of the first graders had mastered Hankul, with the remaindershowing varying levels of competence, and that by the second semester in year 3, all chil-dren had acquired Hankul writing fully (Taylor & Taylor, 1995, p. 233). This high level ofpreschool literacy may well explain why only 8.2% of primary school children have readingdifficulties at their grade level (National Institute of Educational Evaluation, 2001, cited inG.-l. Lee, 2002, p. 3). Moreover, So and Kim’s (2000) investigation shows that low-incomeparents provide their children with almost the same amount of reading materials (and learn-ing environment) as middle-income parents, i.e. an average of 160 children’s books at home

Table 4. Allocation of contact periods by subject area at primary school level.

Subject AreasGrades1 and 2 Subject areas

Grades3 and 4

Grades5 and 6

Korean 448 Korean 408 408Mathematics 256 Social/Moral Studies 272 272Correct living 128 Mathematics 272 272Wise living 192 Science/Practicals 204 340Enjoyable living 384 Physical Education 204 204Creative/Experientialactivities

272 Fine Arts (Music,Painting, etc.)

272 272

English 136 204Creative/Experientialactivitiesa

204 204

Total periodsb 1680 Total periodsb 1972 2176

aClub activities, volunteer work, self-directed activities, etc.bOne contact period = 40 min; 34 weeks per academic year.

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(G.-l. Lee, 2002, p. 2). In the light of South Korean parents’ stronger emphasis on earlychild education in the recent years (cf. Part 1), the preschool literacy level must atpresent be even higher than suggested by these studies.

While building on what is taught at the primary school level, the national curriculum atthe middle and high-school levels places added emphasis on students’ ability to comprehendand express Korean correctly, critically and creatively, and to develop a higher level of criti-cal thinking and aesthetic inclination through language activities (MEST, 2007, p. 26). Alsostressed is the need to enable students to increase their level of appreciation of ‘the nationallanguage culture’, thereby developing a positive attitude towards the development of theKorean language (MEST, 2007, p. 26). Note the national curriculum’s unequivocal focuson the ‘correct’ norms of the national language as well as on lexical, grammatical, stylisticand orthographic changes planned, standardized and implemented by the national govern-ment. This way, students are inculcated through the national education system with a posi-tive attitude towards the national language and changes to be introduced officially. Putdifferently, the national curriculum is the primary actor in South Korea’s language planning(accurately, corpus planning).

The number of contact periods allocated to Korean, as a single subject area, at themiddle school level is the largest by far, as can be seen in Table 5 (MEST, 2009a, p. 7)(note that three of the subject areas listed are actually combinations of individual subjectareas; for instance, science includes biology, chemistry and physics).

Two of the major changes introduced in the 2009 revised national curriculum arereduction in the number of subject areas from 10–13 to 8 per semester and a higherdegree of flexibility in choosing electives. These changes are reflected in terms of whichsubject areas are compulsory or which are not, and also in just over 6% of the totalnumber of contact periods being earmarked for a wide range of electives offered in consider-ation of students’ aptitude and career pathway. That said, schools are allowed to increase thenumber of contact periods for the compulsory subject areas by up to 20% (MEST, 2009a,p. 7). In reality, therefore, most schools may be allocating more hours to the three mostimportant subject areas (i.e. important for the purpose of examinations), namely, Korean,English and mathematics (referred to popularly in South Korea as Kwuk-Yeng-Swu).

The 2009 national curriculum at the high-school level comprises three components, i.e.(i) common subject category, (ii) specialized subject category and (iii) creative/experientialactivities. The common subject category, in turn, consists of core and non-core subject

Table 5. Allocation of contact periods by subject area at middle school level.

Subject areas Grdaes 1, 2 and 3

Korean 442Social and Moral Studies (incl. History) 510Mathematics 374Science and Mechanical Studies/Home Economics 646Physical Education 272Fine Arts (Music, Painting, etc.) 272English 340Electivesa 204Creative/Experiential activities 306Total periodsb 3366

aElectives include Chinese characters, information technology, environment studies, basic conversation in foreignlanguages (i.e. Arabic, Chinese, French, German, Japanese, Russian or Spanish), etc.bOne contact period = 45 min; 34 weeks per academic year.

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areas, the former including Korean, English and mathematics (i.e. Kwuk-Yeng-Swu), thelatter including all other academic subject areas such as fine arts, Hanca, mechanicalstudies, physical education, science, second foreign languages, social studies (encompass-ing history and moral studies), etc. The creative/experiential category consists of clubactivities, volunteer work, career and self-directed activities. The specialized category,intended for specialized high schools only, e.g. vocational or foreign language highschools, includes accounting, agriculture, commerce, commercial fishing, cookery,designing, engineering, foreign languages, horticulture, information and communicationtechnology, international studies, sports, etc. The allocation of study units at the ordinaryor non-specialized high-school level is presented in Table 6 (MEST, 2009a, p. 10).

What stands out from Table 6, in comparison with Tables 4 and 5, is that an equalnumber of contact units is allocated to each of the three core subject areas (i.e. English,Korean and mathematics). At the high-school level, unlike at the primary and middleschool levels, Korean is not allocated more contact hours than English, mathematics andeven other subject areas. Note, however, that just over 31% of the total units (i.e. 64units out of 204) are allocated to a range of electives to be determined by individualschools. In reality, therefore, most high schools may well be using these elective units tofurther emphasize the three most important subject areas, i.e. Korean, English and math-ematics, for purposes of the nationwide College Scholastic Ability Test (CSAT or TayhakSwuhak Nunglyek Sihem), which final-year high-school students are required to take inorder to gain entry into universities or other tertiary institutions. (More information onthe CSAT is provided in the ensuing discussion.)

The 2009 revised national curriculum also contains a section on how individual schoolsare expected to evaluate their own teaching programmes; the primary goal of this process isto evaluate the appropriateness, suitability and effectiveness of the implementation and

Table 6. Allocation of study units at high-school level.

Subcategories Subject areasNo. ofunitsa School-specific electives

Core Korean 15 To be determined at the discretionof individual schools consideringthe students’ aptitude andintended career pathway

Mathematics 15English 15

Non-core Social studiesb 15c

Scienced 15c

Physical Education 10Fine Arts 10

Living/decorum

Mechanical Studies, HomeEconomics, Hanca, 2nd ForeignLanguagese and Social Decorum

16

Subtotal units 116A 64B

Creative/Experiential activities 24C

Total units 204 (A + B + C)

aOne unit = 50 min × 17 sessions.bIncluding history and moral studies.cMEST (2009a) also groups social studies and science together under the study domain of ‘Exploration’, allocating35 units to that study domain; this number, however, does not match the combined total of the units allocated to thetwo subject areas in question (i.e. 15 + 15 = 30). This discrepancy explains why the unit numbers of the core, non-core and living/decorum subcategories add up to 111, instead of 116, as shown in Subtotal units.dPhysics I and II, chemistry I and II, life science I and II, earth science I and II.eArabic I and II, Chinese I and II, French I and II, German I and II, Japanese I and II, Russian I and II, Spanish Iand II.

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administration of the curriculum with a view to identifying problems and issues, andaddressing them in subsequent academic years. From this evaluation procedure, followsthe overall manner of assessing students’ performance, which is internally done byschools instead of being based on a nationwide scheme of assessment (e.g. national stan-dardized examinations), until students decide, as many do (Table 3), to take the CSAT.Thus, assessment at the primary and secondary levels is based on internal evaluation of stu-dents’ achievement levels and verification of their learning outcomes (MEST, 2009a, p. 22).Two important aspects of this assessment system are that students are to be assessed only interms of what has been taught in schools, and that schools are expected to put more empha-sis on essay-based tests than on multiple-choice tests, presumably in order to help studentsimprove their critical and creative thinking. Nonetheless, the reality is that most of the teststypically consist of multiple-choice questions, designed to assess students’ memorizationskills (Yoon, 2009, p. 120). In terms of the national language curriculum, the differentfocus areas have similar or different learning outcomes (MEST, 2009a, p. 96). In listening,students are assessed in terms of factual, inferential and critical understanding as well asimprovement in listening skills. In speaking, assessment shifts to discourse generation,including organization as well as accurate and effective expression. Students’ performancein reading is evaluated in terms of inferential, critical and creative comprehension. Writingis assessed in text generation and organization as well as accurate and effective expression.In the assessment of grammar, emphasis is placed on students’ explicit, as opposed toimplicit, grammatical knowledge and their ability to apply that knowledge. Lastly, theassessment goal of the literature component concerns an understanding and appreciationof literature as well as the ability to generate literature.

As already mentioned, high-school students wishing to progress to the tertiary level arerequired to take the CSAT. This is a highly standardized scholastic aptitude test developedand administered by the Korea Institute of Curriculum and Evaluation (KICE; www.kice.re.kr). The CSATconsists of five components: (i) Korean, with listening; (ii) mathematics; (iii)English, with listening; (iv) social studies, science or vocational education and (v) foreignlanguage or Chinese characters (i.e. Hanca). While the CSAT is a prerequisite for entry intouniversities, it is not unfair to say that South Korean students prepare for it even beforeentering primary school (i.e. early child education; cf. Seth, 2002). Students also need toundergo further entrance examinations and interviews required by individual universities,one important component of which has in recent years been the ability to write criticalessays in Korean (i.e. so-called nonswul). Needless to say, this kind of written testclearly presupposes a high level of competence in the norms of the national language,not to mention a high level of literacy.

Hanca: Chinese characters

The position of Hanca in South Korea’s education system and society as a whole has a longhistory, most of the time as a highly contentious issue. A historical discussion of Hancaeducation and use in South Korea will be provided later in Hanca education and use (inPart 3). Suffice it to note here that the controversy over Hanca (education) and the paralleluse of Hankul and Hanca is now greatly attenuated, owing largely to the rise of English, incomparison with what it was in the past. This turn of events is well reflected in the changesin the MEST’s national curriculum itself. Hanca education is no longer available at theprimary school level. Primary school children wanting to learn Chinese characters haveto learn them on their own or take after-school lessons at private schools (known asHakwon). In the seventh or 1997 revised national curriculum for middle school, Hanca

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education was changed from an elective to a discretionary-elective. Prior to the seventhrevised national curriculum, Hanca was a compulsory subject at the high-school levelbut was reclassified as an elective in that revision. Students now choose to learn 900basic Chinese characters at the middle school level and 900 more characters at the high-school level; Hanca education at the high-school level presupposes that at the middleschool level. This is more or less the state of affairs in the latest or 2009 revised nationalcurriculum. In 2010, about 64% of middle school students and just over 25% of high-school students took Hanca (together with Chinese classics) (Center for EducationalStatistics [a division of KEDI], as provided to the author).

While its days may seem to be numbered in South Korea, especially in view of SouthKoreans’ ‘obsession’ with English, there are indications that Hanca education will not beremoved completely from the national curriculum. For instance, in what amounts to analmost public affront to the MEST’s position, the KICE, operating under the directcontrol of the Premier’s Office, submitted to the MEST in 2009 a survey-based report, inwhich it made the recommendation that Hanca education be incorporated into the nationalprimary school curriculum. The KICE based the recommendation on its survey of 5222parents and teachers; 89.1% of the parents and 77.3% of the teachers (or 83% overall)were in favour of Hanca education at the primary school level (Choson Daily, 2 February2010). The MEST’s reaction to the KICE’s recommendation is reported to be that it wouldencourage primary schools to consider inclusion of Hanca among students’ experientialactivities and investigate measures to promote Hanca education (Choson Daily, 2 February2010). The survey seems to highlight awareness among parents and teachers alike of theimportance of Hanca (education) in South Korean society. Indeed recent years have wit-nessed the appearance of many private schools (i.e. Hakwon) which offer after-schoolcourses in Hanca, not to mention pro-Hanca non-government organizations or NGOs(e.g. National Congress of Hanja [Hanca] Education Promotion; Korea Hanja [Hanca]Education Research Institute). (Readers may like to look at the websites of these NGOswhere Hanca is heavily used (e.g. www.hanja-edu.com; www.hanja.net) in comparisonwith the Hankul-only website of the NIKL (www.korean.go.kr).) In a way, the situation sur-rounding Hanca (education) is not difficult to understand: the promotion of the indigenouswriting system in the face of the reality of Hanca use in society, which has always been thecrux of the long-standing Hankul-Hanca debate.

English

As discussed in Part 1, English has been themost important foreign language in South Koreafor the past six decades or so (e.g. J.-K. Park, 2009; Song, 2011). One of the domains inwhich the importance of English is highlighted is the education system. As can be seenfrom Table 4, English is taught from year 3 at the primary school level, which has beenthe case since 1997 (Butler, 2009, p. 421; K. M. Lee, 2004, p. 95; Moon, 2009, p. 92). Atthe middle school level, as shown in Table 5, English is allocated a comparatively largenumber of contact hours, second only to Korean and mathematics.14 At the high-schoollevel, as shown in Table 6, English is placed on par with Korean and mathematics, hencethe trinity in South Korean education of Kwuk-Yeng-Swu ‘Korean–English–mathematics’.

The importance of English, as pointed out earlier, was recognized officially by PresidentYoung-SamKim’s government (1993–1998) within the context of SouthKorea’s Seykyehwa‘internationalization’. Part of the Seykyehwa drive was to contextualize English-languageeducation by reforming the national English-language curriculum, which ‘had not succeededin developing students’ oral proficiency in English’ (Kaplan & Baldauf, 2003, p. 37).

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The most important aspect of this English curriculum reform was to place great emphasis,through actual use of the language, on successful communication and oral fluency ratherthan on grammatical accuracy. This emphasis led to the introduction in 1997 of Englishinto the primary-school curriculum, and the adoption of the Communicative LanguageLearning Method in preference to the traditionally favoured Grammar-TranslationMethod (for case studies of this major pedagogical change, see Butler, 2009; Jung &Norton, 2002; K. M. Lee, 2004). The importance of English was reinforced by PresidentMyung-Bak Lee’s announcement in 2008 of the plan to have all English classes inprimary and secondary schools conducted only in English by 2012. In point of fact, the Pre-sidential Transition Committee’s original proposal, announced in 2008, was to teach notonly English but also other non-English subjects in English only from 2010 (J. Lee,2010), although in the face of public opposition or scepticism, the ambitious English-immersion proposal was retracted within 5 days of its announcement. This heightenedemphasis on English was part and parcel of President Lee’s vision for South Korea’seconomic revival (i.e. so-called Second Miracle on the Han River), on the strength ofwhich he came to power in 2008. His neoliberal government proposed a range of changesto the existing policies, one of which was the national English-language curriculum. In par-ticular, it was argued that global competitiveness, crucial for South Korea’s economicrevival, could not be achieved without South Koreans being able to converse in Englishor to understand information and knowledge available in English. This called for substantialrevision of the national English-language curriculum, i.e. an increase in contact hours andthe adoption of the communicative language learning method.

In an attempt to provide students with opportunities to use English (e.g. with nativespeakers of English) for communicative purposes, South Korea has also been recruiting‘native speaker English teachers’ (NSET) from Australia, Canada, New Zealand, SouthAfrica, the USA and the UK. Recruitment of NSETs for public schools is carried outmainly through the English Programme in Korea (EPIK), South Korea’s answer toJapan’s Japan Exchange and Teaching Programme (Gottlieb, 2008, p. 45, on the latter).The EPIK programme is administered by the National Institute for International Education(operating directly under the MEST), and had recruited 3377 NSETs as of March, 2009(retrieved from www.epik.go.kr). The EPIK programme has also given rise to a sister pro-gramme called Teach and Learn in Korea or TaLK (www.talk.go.kr), which awards short-term scholarships to tertiary-level students from English-speaking countries in exchange forteaching English at rural public schools while learning about Korean culture and society atthe same time. Moreover, a few municipal or provincial governments have independentlybeen operating their own NSET recruitment programmes. For instance, the Seoul MunicipalOffice of Education has recently drawn up a plan to have at least one NSET working inevery public school by 2012; the Gyeonggi provincial government has also been operatingits own NSET recruitment programme (Gyeonggi English Programme in Korea or GEPIKfor short; http://gepik-tek.weebly.com/index.html) for some years.

It must be realized, however, that there is a political dimension to NSET recruitment pro-grammes such as EPIK and TaLK. Some wealthy South Korean parents, dissatisfied withEnglish-language education available in the country, send their school-age children to Aus-tralia, Canada, NewZealand or the USA forCokiyuhak ‘early overseas education’ (e.g. morethan 35,000 primary and secondary school students were on early overseas education in theschool year of 2005–2006; see Moon, 2009, pp. 98–99; J.-K. Park, 2009, pp. 53–55; Park &Abelmann, 2004; Stevens, Jin, & Song, 2006). This kind of private English-language edu-cation has given rise to what South Koreans refer to aptly as ‘the English Divide’: thesocio-economic division between South Koreans who cannot afford to give their children

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private after-school English lessons, let alone much more expensive Cokiyuhak, and SouthKoreans who can. Thus, the national government was forced to (be seen to) do somethingto address the high level of resentment, especially among low-income families, towardsprivate English-language education, hence the birth of the EPIK and TaLK programmes,the latter designed specifically to post NSETs to public schools in rural areas. WhetherSouth Korea will be able to manage to have English classes conducted in English only by2012, at the end of which President Lee’s term expires, remains to be seen. One serious logis-tical problem with President Lee’s plan, even if pedagogical problems or issues are set aside,is that South Korea may not be able to produce (in time) a sufficient number of local teacherswho have the ability, let alone thewillingness, to conduct their English classes in English only(e.g. see Jung & Norton, 2002; K. M. Lee, 2004; Li, 1998; also Kim, 2008 on TeachingEnglish Through English (TETE), as practised in select South Korean schools, andvarious problems or issues related to TETE), although a recent government documentstated that in 2010, 7000 more teachers would be placed in schools specifically to teachEnglish conversational skills (MEST, 2009b).

South Korea’s national English-language curriculum has always recognized English notjust as a ‘content’ subject but also as a ‘function’ subject. In other words, English should betaught in the national school system in such a way that students can learn to use Englisheffectively (outside the school) and contribute to the nation’s development through anunderstanding of foreign cultures. In the seventh revised national curriculum, English-language education was characterized as learner-centred (e.g. taking individual differencesinto account), communication-focused, activity/task-based, conducive to logical thinkingand creativity, and last but not least, contributing ultimately both to the nation’s develop-ment and to globalization. Note that the nation’s (economic) development goes hand inhand with globalization. In the globalized world, access to knowledge and information isvitally important for economic development, and proficiency in English is claimed to under-pin that access (i.e. the ‘survivalist’s view’). Similarly, the 2007 revised English-languagecurriculum reiterates learner-centredness (via advanced, remedial or elective courses),emphasizes continuity between different grades and school levels, and reinforces the com-municative function of English and the cultural dimension to English-language learning,together with concomitant teaching and learning methods and assessment measures. The2007 revised national English-language curriculum declares that the ultimate goal ofEnglish education is not based on native speakers’ competence level but so-called ‘intercul-tural’ English speakers’ (see e.g. Matsuda, 2003 for such a pedagogical view). This is basedon the fact that South Koreans increasingly use English with speakers of languages otherthan English, not just with native speakers of English. These goals and aims will translate,at the primary school level, into the ability to develop interest in, and enthusiasm for,English and to understand and use ‘basic English’, as spoken in everyday life, and at thesecondary level, into the ability to understand and use ‘basic English’ with respect to every-day life and general topics. Moreover, primary school children are expected to develop theability to understand other cultures and related social conventions, while secondary studentsare expected not only to understand other cultures through English lessons but also todevelop the ability to introduce foreigners to South Korean culture in English.

One of the major ‘innovations’ in the 2007 revised national English-language curricu-lum is learner-centredness, as already mentioned. What this entails is that additional orremedial lessons are available in years 3–6, depending on individual students’ achievementlevel, at the primary school level. At the middle school level as well as in year 1 at the high-school level, students take the same English lessons but can only proceed to the next level ifthey have reached the target level of achievement. Lastly, in years 2 and 3 at the high-school

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level, students, depending on their preferences or career aspirations, can take electives –under ‘School-specific Electives’ in Table 6 – in different kinds of English courseranging from conversational English to advanced English reading and writing. Given thefocus placed on the academic trinity of Korean–English–mathematics, many studentsmay be encouraged to take electives in such additional English courses.

To give the reader an idea of the level of achievement,15 the total number of Englishwords taught at the primary level is 520, and that taught from year 1 at the middle schoollevel to year 1 at the high-school level is 1290, with the maximum number of wordsallowed to range from around 1810 to 2315. A further breakdown of these numbers is pre-sented in Table 7.

The mean length of sentence in years 3 and 4 at the primary level is set to be withinseven words, while that in years 5 and 6 at the primary level is limited to nine words(but not counting conjunctions such as and, but and or).16

Little will be said about assessment, as more or less the same thing explained above withrespect to Korean applies to English, except that the importance of listening comprehensionin English has recently been highlighted in a MEST document (2009b), which indicates thatEnglish listening tests will account for 50% in the CSAT as from 2013, a substantialincrease from the current level of 34%.17

Other foreign languages

While the global importance of English is undeniably palpable, it is judicious not to losesight of regionally important languages in the world (e.g. Graddol, 2006). Indeed theadvent of the European Union and other possible regional economic/cultural configurations(e.g. Africa, East Asia, North America, South America, etc.) has drawn attention to region-ally important languages. Moreover, with the rise of globalization, many so-called mono-lingual nations are increasingly becoming multilingual owing to, for instance, the influxof migrant workers, and South Korea is no exception to this trend. The 2007 revisednational curriculum was designed to reflect the understanding of some of these factorsby recognizing seven foreign languages as electives at the high-school level: Arabic,Chinese, French, German, Japanese, Russian and Spanish. It has also been claimed inthe revised national curriculum that these languages may be a more effective way of com-municating with their speakers than English is, as their use will engender familiarity and

Table 7. Number of English words to be learnt in schools(MEST, 2008a).

Level Number of words

Primary school Year 3 Around 120Year 4 Around 120Year 5 Around 140Year 6 Around 140Subtotal Around 520

Middle school Year 1 Around 170Year 2 Around 280Year 3 Around 390

High school Year 1 Around 450Subtotal Around 1290Total Around 1810a

aAllowed to increase up to 2315 words.

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trust during communication. Indeed the 2007 revised national foreign languages curricu-lum, as does the English-language curriculum, highlights cultural understanding or aware-ness as an integral part of language learning (MEST, 2008b), together with learner-centredapproaches to language learning. Recall that English was taken out of the category offoreign languages in the revised 2009 national curriculum, and also that foreign languagesare taught in high schools only (although basic conversation in the foreign languages can betaken as an elective at the middle school level; cf. Table 5). Each of the seven foreignlanguages can be studied at Level One and Level Two. The numbers of words introducedat these levels, ranging from 1200 to 1400, are specified for each language in Table 8.

Once again, readers are referred to the section on Korean regarding assessment as thesame general assessment applies also to these foreign languages. It must be noted,however, that while the foreign languages are examined in the CSAT, there are no listeningtests involved, unlike in English (and Korean).

Table 9 shows the number of high-school students taking these languages in 2010.The data in Table 9 reveal that nearly 30% (i.e. 596,044) of the high-school studentsenrolled in 2010 (about two million) were studying foreign languages. The most popularforeign language among South Korean high-school students is Japanese (62.8%);Chinese (28.4%) being the distant first runner-up. Unlike Japanese and Chinese, the Euro-pean languages are not doing well, albeit all better than Arabic. Note that no communitylanguages except Chinese (e.g. Filipino, Indonesian, Thai, Vietnamese, etc.) are currentlytaught in South Korea’s education system (cf. Table 1). (It must be said that Chinese isselected for the high-school curriculum because it is a regionally and internationally impor-tant language, not because it is a major community language spoken in South Korea.) This

Table 8. Number of words to be acquired in foreignlanguage subjects (MEST, 2008b).

Language Level Number of words

German I Around 500II Around 800

French I Around 500II Around 800

Spanish I Around 500II Around 800

Chinese I Around 400II Around 800

Japanese I Around 500II Around 900

Russian I Around 400II Around 800

Arabic I Around 400II Around 800

Table 9. High-school students taking electives in foreign languages in 2010 (Center for EducationStatistics, KEDI, as provided to the author).

Foreign languages

Japanese Chinese French German Spanish Russian Arabic

No. of students 374,576 169,312 25,025 21,841 4158 1132 Nil

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situation contrasts with that in Australia and the USA, for instance, where community, notjust internationally important, languages are taught in primary and secondary schools(Clyne, 2005; Potowski, 2010; also note 20). Whether to teach community languages inschools will inevitably arise as an issue if and when migrant workers, along with foreignspouses, settle down as permanent residents in great numbers – by marrying SouthKoreans, as they have already started to do (see Part 3 for further discussion of this issue).

Private language learning

In 2008, there were 70,213 private education providers (known as Hakwon); 47% of themwere so-called ‘cram’ schools providing after-school courses in core school subject areas(e.g. Korean, English, mathematics, etc.) to students who would like to prepare themselves(better) for school examinations, the CSAT and university entrance examinations (JoongAng Daily, 15 December 2009). All courses taught at cram schools are designed and deliv-ered with only one goal in mind: to train students to do well in examinations. Hakwoncourses in Korean and English are no exception to this rule. It is not clear how many ofthe remaining private education providers (i.e. 53%) are English-language schools (i.e.unfortunately, there is no central database because private schools are not registered withthe MEST but only with district educational departments (Korea Association of ForeignLanguage Academies [www.kafla.or.kr/], personal communication); it is not possible,anyway, to have an exact number of private schools because of fly-by-night operators).While there are some private schools specializing in music, computer skills, calligraphy,etc. the majority of ‘non-cram’ Hakwon schools are probably English-language schools(e.g. preparing students and adults for the listening parts of the CSAT, TOEFL and otherEnglish proficiency tests, the latter demanded for white-collar work or for promotion appli-cations), although some of them may also provide courses in other foreign languages (e.g.Chinese, Japanese). In this context, one should also take into account a large number ofprivate tutors who go to students’ homes to teach core school subject areas as well asEnglish (conversation). Mention must also be made of so-called English kindergartens,where preschool children are taught basic English, usually by native speakers of English.Note that kindergartens, operated by private owners, are not categorized as Hakwon. Agrowing number of South Korean parents send their preschool children to English kinder-gartens in the hope that they will make headway in learning English. While, at the time ofwriting, kindergarten education is not paid for by the state (but see note 12), many SouthKorean parents enrol their children in kindergartens. In 2010, there were almost 540,000children enrolled in 8388 kindergartens (MEST & KEDI, 2010). Some of these children(i.e. those who attended English kindergartens) would have been already exposed toEnglish (literacy) well before English classes are to be offered in year 3 at the primaryschool level.

Hankwuke: Korean for the ‘others’

While they refer to Korean as Kwuke ‘the national language’, South Koreans call it by adifferent name, i.e. Hankwuke ‘the Korean language’, when making reference to it as aforeign or second language (see Gottlieb, 2008, p. 4 for a comparable situation in Japan).This section discusses the global spread of Hankwuke among both non-South Koreansand overseas Koreans. Within South Korea, Hankwuke is taught to foreign brides,migrant workers and their offspring as well as to international students. There are alsonon-Koreans learning Korean as a foreign language (KFL) in their own home countries.

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In South Korea, Hankwuke, i.e. Korean as a Second Language (KSL), is taught inprimary and secondary schools on a very limited scale. This does not come as a surprisebecause KSL lies outside the purview of the national education system. Indeed, KSL isnot part of the national curriculum, as can be inferred from Tables 4, 5, 6 and 8. Whilethere are more than 11,000 primary, middle and high schools, only 34 schools in thewhole country were reported to have offered KSL to a mere 156 students on their owninitiative (MEST, 2006).18 As of May 2006, however, there were 7998 students from inter-national marriages and 1574 from migrant families (MEST, 2006). A recent MEST docu-ment (2008c, as cited in Oh, 2009, p. 3) shows that in 2008, there were 18,769 studentsfrom international marriages and 1402 from migrant families, with almost 85% of themenrolled in primary schools. In point of fact, most of KSL is delivered outside the nationaleducation system, that is, through so-called multicultural family or migrant worker supportcentres set up by municipal, provincial and district governments throughout the country.There are also over 300 similar support centres operated by NGOs (e.g. churches, socialwelfare and labour movement groups), which provide KSL courses to foreign brides andmigrant workers (and possibly their children also). In addition, a handful of private edu-cational providers (i.e. Hakwon) offer KSL courses. Moreover, in 2009, as many as 59 uni-versities had their own Korean-language schools for international students enrolled in theirdegree programmes and courses or short intensive Korean-language courses (Lee, 2009,p. 207). Some of these university-operated Korean-language courses may also be availableas adult or ‘life-long’ education programmes, which means that foreign brides or migrantworkers may be able to access them, although they have to pay for them themselves. (Inci-dentally, the recent growth of Korean-language courses at universities has actually beeninitiated as part of South Korea’s drive for Seykeyhwa ‘internationalization’, the presenceof large numbers of international students on campus being one of the recognized indicatorsof internationalization.) Within South Korea, KSL is taught largely through NGOs and pro-vincial or municipal governments. To wit, while cognizant of the need for KSL for childrenfrom international marriages and migrant families (MEST, 2006), the national governmentdoes not seem to believe that their numbers are sufficient to warrant the introduction of KSLinto the national curriculum.

Outside (South) Korea, Hankwuke is taught to two main groups of people: overseasKoreans and non-Korean learners of Hankwuke. First, South Korean migrants have tra-ditionally made use of community-based weekend schools to help children learn and main-tain Korean as their heritage language (Kim, 2010; Lee & Shin, 2008). These weekendschools are typically called Hankul, not Hankwuke, schools, probably because of theassumption that these children, being ethnically Koreans, should be able to speak and under-stand some Korean but not necessarily to writeHankul. IndeedHankul schools tend to placemuch emphasis on Korean literacy development.Hankul schools meet once a week for a fewhours, but not throughout the year. How effective Hankul schools have been in helpingethnic Koreans maintain their heritage language needs to be investigated carefully, althoughCho (2000) and J. S. Lee (2002) report, in the case of the USA, that there is a weak corre-lation between Hankul school attendance and proficiency in the language. There are pro-blems with Hankul schools, e.g. students’ resentment against having to attend school onweekends and lack of professional development for Hankul school teachers, who tend tobe volunteers (Lee & Shin, 2008, p. 10). Table 10 shows the number of Hankul schoolsand students in the country by 2010.19

Overall, the Hankul school participation rates among ethnic Koreans do not seem to behigh, all under 8% or the majority under 5% of the total population. The more the ethnicKoreans there are, the fewer the Korean children seem to attend Hankul schools. There

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are also 30 Korean-medium schools, accredited by South Korea’s MEST, which cater forthe children of South Korean nationals working in various countries (e.g. employees ofSouth Korean companies, diplomats and trade representatives). These children are expectedto return to South Korea upon the completion of their parents’ overseas stints and resumetheir studies in South Korea. China has the largest number of such Korean-medium schools,i.e. 10. The rest are distributed as follows: Japan (four), Saudi Arabia (two), Taiwan (two),Vietnam (two), and one each in Argentina, Brazil, Egypt, Indonesia, Iran, Paraguay, Philip-pines, Russia, Singapore and Thailand.

The second group ofHankwuke learners outside (South)Korea are non-Korean nationals.There were reported to be 742 tertiary Korean-language courses taught across 64 countries in2007, and 643 Korean-language programmes or departments spread across 55 countries in2008 (Lee, 2009, p. 208). Moreover, in 2008 there were 628 primary and secondaryschools in 15 countries that offered Korean-language courses (Lee, 2009, p. 208). Tradition-ally, the international promotion of Hankwuke and other Korea-related disciplines has beencarried out by the Korea Foundation (KF; www.kf.or.kr), which helped create, between 1992and 2010, as many as 100 academic positions at 69 universities in 12 countries. The focus ofthe KF, however, has been on Korean studies, including the language, at university level,although language/linguistics has received more KF-funded academic positions than anyother disciplines. More recently, the task of promoting Korean among other nations seemsto have been shifted to the International Korean Language Foundation (IKLF; www.glokorean.org), established in 2001 under the jurisdiction of the MEST. The IKLF’s briefis to contribute to the global spread of Korean as well as the teaching of KFL. Their targetaudiences include not only foreign learners of Korean but also overseas Koreans. TheIKLF, in conjunctionwith theNIKL, develops and distributes teaching and learningmaterialsin the Korean language as well as materials pertaining to Korean culture. The IKLF has twoprimary teaching outlets, i.e. Sejong Haktang schools and Nuli-Sejong Haktang schools.Sejong Haktang schools, physically located in other countries, teach Korean to foreign lear-ners of Korean and to ethnic Koreans, whereas Nuli-Sejong Haktang schools are virtualschools, operated by means of online distance education. The other major task performed

Table 10. Hankul schools and their student numbers (MEST & KEDI, 2010, with the numbers ofethnic Koreans retrieved from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade at www.mofat.go.kr on 15April 2011).

Country No. of Hankul schools Number of students [No. of ethnic Koreans]

Argentina 19 1032 [22,024]Australia 37 3003 [125,669]Brazil 25 1412 [48,419]Canada 71 4195 [223,322]France 15 560 [14,738]Germany 33 1397 [31,248]Japan 127 6509 [913,152]Kazakhstan 103 4199 [103,952]Kyrgyzstan 43 1405 [19,420]Paraguay 4 343 [5229]Russia 122 8088 [222,027]United Kingdom 20 642 [45,295]US 687 40,864 [2,085,473]Uzbekistan 122 134 [175,939]Total 1428 73,783

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by the IKLF is to train or re-educate teachers of KSL or KFL. Unfortunately, information onhow much and exactly what kind of work has so far been done in how many differentcountries is not readily available, although Lee (2009, p. 208) reports that as of June 2008,there were 2177 ‘Hankwuke education centres’ in 114 countries, serving 251, 361 enrolledstudents in total (as opposed to 65 Hankwuke education centres in 34 countries, with77,282 enrolled students in 2001). Hankwuke education centres are Korean-language-teaching institutions or organizations managed and/or supported by the South Korean gov-ernment (e.g. Sejong Haktang schools). Note that these numbers also include overseasHankul schools and Korean-medium schools, but exclude other countries’ own universitiesand schools offering Korean-language programmes.20 The distribution of Hankwuke edu-cation centres is presented in Table 11. From this table, it is possible to calculate howmany Hankwuke-teaching institutions or organizations, other than Hankul schools andKorean-medium schools (i.e. established for ethnic Koreans and Korean nationals, respect-ively) are operated by the South Korean government outside its territory. For instance, inJapan there are 142 Hankwuke education centres in total. In that country, there are 127Hankul schools and four Korean-medium schools (see Table 10 and the adjacent discussion).This suggests that in Japan there are 11 Korean-language-teaching institutions operated bythe South Korean government, e.g. IKLF’s Sejong Haktang schools or Hankwukeprogrammes delivered by the Korean Education Centers or Korean Cultural Centers.

Mention must also be made of two internationally recognized Korean proficiency teststo be taken by non-native speakers of Korean as well as overseas Koreans: (i) the KoreanLanguage Proficiency Test (KLPT), delivered by the Korean Language Society (www.klpt.org/english) and (ii) the Test of Proficiency in Korean (TOPIK), administered by the NIKL(www.topik.go.kr). Incidentally, 120,519 candidates sat for the KLPT in 2007 and 170,507candidates sat for the TOPIK in 2009 (Lee, 2009, p. 204).

Part 3: issues in South Korea’s language policy and planning

The first recorded event of language policy and planning in the history of Korea is KingSejong’s invention of the Hankul writing system in the fifteenth-century CE. BetweenKing Sejong’s death in 1450 and Japan’s annexation of Korea in 1910, however, therewas little or no language policy or planning to speak of, as Chinese (characters) had con-tinuously been upheld by the ruling class as the writing system of the country, with Hankulused by noble women and commoners only. This situation would change little until the late

Table 11. Hankwuke education centres (retrieved from theNational Institute of the Korean Language at www.korean.go.kr).

Region/CountryNo. of Hankwuke education

centres

Asia (excluding Japan) 225Commonwealth of Independent

States506

Europe 115Japan 142Middle East/Africa 42North America 1072South America 75Total 2177

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nineteenth century, which briefly witnessed the rise of nationalism in response to foreignaggression. In 1921, a group of Korean-language scholars established the Cosene Hakhoi‘Korean Language Society’ – later renamed Hankul Hakhoi. This scholarly society spear-headed the Korean-language movement by raising the public awareness of, and endeavour-ing to standardize, Hankul. However, the movement was short lived as it was put down bythe Japanese colonial government, which made a very serious attempt to abolish the Koreanlanguage and eventually to annihilate the whole indigenous culture. To that end, indeed,Japanese began to be taught in 1911, one year after the annexation of Korea. Up to the con-clusion of World War II, the Japanese language accounted for 40% of all school hours inprimary school (Hirataka, 1992, p. 94). In 1938, the study or use of Korean became ‘volun-tary’ in schools under the new Korean Education Statute. By 1941, when the Statute wasrevised, Korean had been removed completely from the colonial education system (Lee,1975 cited in Gottlieb, 1994, p. 8; also Rhee, 1992 and Taylor & Taylor, 1995, p. 261;cf. Tsurumi, 1984 for an overview of Japanese colonial education policy in Korea). Theban on Korean was later enforced to the extent that Japanese was promoted in all areasof daily life to the exclusion of Korean. In 1940, Koreans were even forced to ‘japanize’their names (e.g. the most common Korean name Kim ‘gold’ being converted intoKaneoka ‘gold hill’), although their Korean names still had to be used in official records.Not surprisingly, the objective of the Korean Language Society had, in response to the Japa-nese oppression, changed from the promotion of Korean to the preservation thereof.However, the Japanese colonial government disbanded the Korean Language Society in1942, and many of its members were imprisoned or killed.

From independence in 1945 to the early 1990s, South Korea did not have a single gov-ernment agency or organization to oversee language planning and policy matters, whichwere handled largely by the MOE as part of the national curriculum. Consequently, SouthKorea’s language planning and policy had been a kind of tug-of-war, as it were, betweendifferent NGOs – in particular, Hankul Hakhoi ‘Korean Language Society’ and its rivalKwuke Hakhoi ‘National Language Society’ –with divergent agendas, with the governmentof the day changing its position from one extreme to the other, especially in terms of the useof Chinese characters. In 1990, however, language planning and policy work was transferredfrom the MOE to the newly established Ministry of Culture (to be restructured into the Min-istry of Culture and Sports, and then into theMinistry of Culture, Sports and Tourism), one ofthe outcomes of the transfer being the establishment of the Department of the NationalLanguage Policy within the Ministry of Culture. This development led further to the birthin 1991 of the NIKL. In addition, the Minister of Culture, Sports and Tourism has his orher own advisory committee to consult in decision-making: the National LanguageAdvisoryCommittee. These three entities are now responsible for South Korea’s language planningand policy. This is how they work together. The NIKL investigates language planning/policy issues or concerns through academic research and makes appropriate recommen-dations or proposes planning/policy measures, through the Department of the NationalLanguage Policy, to the Minister of Culture, Sports and Tourism. With the assistance ofthe National Language Advisory Committee, the Minister then makes decisions on theNIKL’s recommendations and forwards policy measures to the President for final approvaland implementation. Given the central nature of its work, the NIKL can be said to be thegovernment agency for South Korea’s language planning and policy, with the Departmentof the National Language Policy and the National Language Advisory Committee playinga secondary role.

The legal basis of South Korea’s language planning and policy is embodied in KwukeKipon Pep ‘the National Language Basic Law’, partially revised and enacted on 18 March

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2009 (as Legal Act No. 9491). This law requires the Minister of Culture, Sports andTourism to draw up action plans – known as Kwuke Palcen Kipon Kyehoik ‘Basic Planson the National Language Development’ – through the medium of the NIKL, once every5 years and to implement them in specific language planning/policy areas. The Ministeris also required to submit a biennial report on implemented language policies or measuresto the Parliament. Which dialect is to be selected as the standard has never been much of anissue for South Korea (or initially, for both North and South Korea until North Korea chosethe Pyongyang dialect as Standard North Korean in 1966).21 Not surprisingly, the NationalLanguage Basic Law does not allude to any issues relating to Standard South Korean.

In the rest of Part 3, the following issues or concerns, drawn largely from the NationalLanguage Basic Law, will be discussed, from a historical perspective, with emphasis onwhat factors have motivated various changes or developments over the decades:

(i) orthographic norms and reforms,(ii) the use and teaching of Hanca ‘Chinese characters’,(iii) purification of Korean (i.e. replacement of Sino-Korean words with native

Korean ones, or Japanese and English loanwords with native or Sino-Koreanones),

(iv) production of authoritative Korean dictionaries,(v) Korean-language education in schools (in particular, production of Korean-

language textbooks),(vi) digitization/computerization of Korean (including the development of digitized

Korean corpora, web-based Korean (monolingual or bi/multilingual) diction-aries, etc.),

(vii) ‘linguistic reunification’ of North and South Korea and(viii) so-called ‘internationalization of Korean’ (e.g. Korean as a foreign or heritage

language).

Orthographic norms

When the Korean Language Society proposed a so-called Unified Orthography (HankulMacchwumpep Tongilan) in 1933, it was evident that the Korean language had changedover the previous five centuries. For example, several phonemes had been lost, some newphonemes had been added, vowel harmony had almost disappeared and some diphthongshad been monophthongized (C.-W. Kim, 1978, p. 249). However, the Hankul writingsystem had never been subjected to any revision or standardization, with its users beingleft more or less to their own devices. It had been regarded as a ‘vulgar’ writing system,after all. Naturally, the Korean Language Society conceived of the revision or standardiz-ation of the Hankul system as one of its primary tasks (another being production of a com-prehensive Korean dictionary, which could not be brought to completion due to the Japanesecolonial government’s disbanding of the Society in 1942). The basic principle of the UnifiedOrthography was to ‘reflect the “original form” of roots, ignoring the consequences of thevarious phonological rules that affect them’ (Sampson, 1985, p. 139). Thus, it wasmoremor-phophonemically than phonemically based, as King Sejong’s Hankul system had originallybeen. However, the Unified Orthography could not be adopted, because Korea was stillunder Japanese rule. After independence in 1945, it was immediately accepted by theSouth Korean government without serious evaluation, perhaps in appreciation of theKorean Language Society’s resistance to the Japanese colonial government.

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It was gradually realized, however, that the Unified Orthography was arbitrary, far fromconsistent, and thus in great need of improvement. For instance, the so-called l-droppingrule, stipulating that l in the initial position of Sino-Korean words be deleted, was not com-prehensive enough in the Unified Orthography, with some cases being left unexplained. Italso contained specific spelling rules that were obsolete or redundant. For example, itdecreed that ppalnay ‘laundry’ be spelled as ppallay, but the latter form had already longbeen in use and accepted widely. Thus, in 1970 the government set up a committee tolook into the matter of further amendingHankul. The committee, in turn, carried out a ques-tionnaire survey over 3 years (1972–1974). The breakdown of those who were involved inthe survey is as follows (C.-W. Kim, 1978, p. 250): 1288 persons were surveyed, consistingof (i) 789 secondary teachers (61.2%); (ii) 157 primary school teachers (12.2%); (iii) 151university professors (11.7%); (iv) 100 media professionals (7.8%); (v) 62 authors and pro-fessional writers (4.8%) and (vi) others, 29 (2.3%). In 1978, a Revised Orthography wasdrafted. However, it subsequently had to undergo a series of additional revisions, beingevaluated by three different bodies in succession (i.e. the Korean Academy of Arts andSciences in 1981, the Korean Language Research Institute in 1984 and finally the MOEin 1987). Lee (1988, p. 35) reports that the atmosphere of these review committees wasnot always cooperative and collegial, but more often than not, was hostile and antagonistic,with reformists and conservatives at loggerheads with each other. This is not entirelysurprising, because established written norms ‘attract emotional attachment, and hence dis-cussions about the reform of a given orthography or script often resemble a religious warmore than a rational discourse, generating more heat than light’ (Coulmas, 1989, p. 241).

The Revised Orthography was at long last announced officially in January 1988 with theintent that it be put into practice from 1March 1989 (which, incidentally, marked the seven-tieth anniversary of Korea’s bloody uprising against Japanese colonial rule). The revisedsystem was designed, for example, to resolve those cases which were left unexplained inrelation to the l-dropping rule, to eliminate obsolete spelling rules, and to distinguish thefinal verbal ending o and the non-final verbal ending yo, which had not been kept apart inthe Unified Orthography (for further details, see Lee, 1988, pp. 35–41 and Kwon & Kim,1990).22 Although it took the government more than a decade to adopt it, the Revised Ortho-graphy is reported to have much resemblance to the Unified Orthography, the drasticchanges of the 1978 draft having been abandoned in what Lee (1988, p. 35) refers toaptly as a victory of conservatives over reformists.

Hanca education and use

Following post-World War II independence from Japan, the Korean Language Society andits supporters began to push ahead with the policy of the exclusive use of Hankul. It was asif they wanted to celebrate the independence of the nation by adopting the Hankul-onlypolicy (Sim, 1990, p. 91). They came to the realization that Koreans also needed to untanglethemselves from Hanca, which had for the past two millennia permeated Korean (society).Their objective was to raise the status of Hankul and consequently, of Korean as much aspossible.

Thus, the Korean Language Society declared war on Hanca by proclaiming that ‘[t]heassertion of restricted use of [Hanca] is the greatest enemy of the exclusive use of [Hankul]’(Taylor & Taylor, 1995, p. 254). However, a conservative government did not immediatelyagree with that demand but allowed the ‘parallel’ use of the Korean script and Chinese char-acters for a decade. It was not until 1957 that the cabinet passed a resolution in favour of theexclusive use of Hankul and banned the use of Hanca.23 This outraged both the media and

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the educated section of the society.24 They protested vehemently that Chinese characters,being logographic, ‘gave the reader an effective means of visual communication’ (C.-W.Kim, 1978, p. 247) and helped reduce a large number of homonyms (at least in writing),thereby contributing to faster comprehension.25 They also expressed the opinion that theelimination of Hanca would not only deprive Koreans of their own cultural heritage (e.g.with almost all historical documents and traditional teachings written in Chinese), butalso cut them off from ‘the East Asian cultural block’, to which China, Japan and Koreaall belong (the use of Chinese characters being one of the binding factors). The governmentconceded and in 1964 drew up a list of 1300 Chinese characters to be introduced progress-ively in primary and secondary schools. The Hankul proponents stuck to their guns andclaimed – to the point of accusing Hanca proponents of being toadies and unpatriotic –

that the exclusive use of Hankul, without the use of Hanca, would enhance Korea’s culturalindependence and enable Koreans to gain their cultural self-esteem. In addition to thisemotional plea, practical factors were put forward for consideration: (i) efficiency ofHankul in terms of learning and printing; (ii) positive effect ofHankul on elimination of illit-eracy; (iii) Hankul as the popular medium of mass education and (iv) susceptibility ofHankul to mechanization.26

In 1968, the government was persuaded to announce a 5-year plan for the abolition ofHanca, which was later in the same year revised to a 2-year plan. Thus, the policy of theexclusive use ofHankulwas brought right back in 1970. This immediately provoked the cri-ticism from the media that high-school graduates could not read newspapers, in whichChinese characters were still used for Sino-Korean words. This time conservatives werebetter organized. For instance, Hankwuk Emwun Kyoyuk Yenkwuhoi ‘Research Institute ofEducation in the Korean Language andWriting’was inaugurated in 1969 with a view to pro-moting, and lobbying for, the use and teaching of Hanca. The conservatives harked back totheir old arguments in support ofHanca (plus such questionable or ludicrous ones asHancabeing conducive to cognitive development or lack of Hanca education resulting in teenagedelinquency). But they also drew attention to the undeniable fact that the earlier policy of theexclusive use ofHankul had failed because, outside the government and school,Hankul andHanca had continued to be mixed in writing and publications, while schools were churningout graduates who were functionally illiterate in Hanca. In other words, the conservativeswere now appealing to the responsibility of the government and the school in public edu-cation. Myriads of pro-Hanca articles appeared in newspapers and in the popular periodicalof the Research Institute of Education in the Korean Language and Writing, Emun Yenkwu‘Research in Language and Writing’, which effectively served as the official mouthpiece ofHanca proponents (also see the Institute’s collection of pro-Hanca articles, entitled Hankulkwa Hanca ‘Hankul and Hanca’, published in 1985 and reprinted in 1996). In 1972, thenational government changed its tune again and came up with a new list of 1800 basicChinese characters to be taught in secondary schools (see Ahn, 1983 for a summary ofthe Hankul-Hanca confrontation). As already noted in Hanca: Chinese characters (Part2), in the seventh – or 1997 – revised national curriculum Hanca education was changedfrom an elective to a discretionary-elective for middle school students and reclassified asan elective for high-school students. Thus, Hanca education has not been compulsorysince the implementation of the 1997 revised national curriculum. Students now have theoption of learning 900 basic Chinese characters at the middle school level and an additional900 characters at the high-school level.

The status and role of Hanca in South Korean society were highlighted once again inJanuary 1999, when the Ministry of Culture and Tourism announced the plan to reintroducethe parallel use of Hankul and Hanca, even in official government documents and also on

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public road signs – prompted by President Tae-Jung Kim’s call for internationalization andcultural heritage.27 Needless to say, Hankul-only proponents did not waste any time instaging public protests against this initiative. Another round in the tug of war betweenthe two opposing camps had only just commenced. As Choi (2003, p. 116) reports,however, this ‘new’ initiative has not been implemented as successfully as the governmentwould have liked, in the face of the fierce opposition from the Korean Language Societyand other Hankul-only proponents. However, the lack of success of the renewed parallel-use policy may have more to do with the rise of English than with South Koreans’ rejectionof Hanca. English has already begun to replace Chinese characters as a prestigious form ofwriting among South Koreans, particularly in advertising and brand/product names.

The rise of English notwithstanding, the disappearance of Hanca (or Hanca educationfor that matter) is hardly a foregone conclusion. There is some evidence in support of itslong-term survival. First, South Korean society continues to use Hanca in importantsocial or functional domains. Many (English) technical or academic terms, if they are trans-lated instead of directly borrowed into Korean, tend to be built on Sino-Korean words, whichare based ultimately on Chinese characters – just as some learned English words are based onLatin or Greek roots. Second, in South Korea a good understanding of Hanca has for manycenturies been associated with erudition and education. For instance, many professionals (e.g. university professors, business people, etc.) have their names, titles and academic quali-fications on their business cards printed in Hanca (as well as in Korean and/or English).28

Third, nearly all South Koreans name their offspring on the basis ofHanca (more accurately,meanings of Chinese characters, in order to capture their aspirations for the children, e.g.health, wealth, happiness, intelligence, talent or even fertility). Certainly, some SouthKorean parents insist on native Korean words when naming their children, but they arethe exception rather than the norm. Many business or corporate names too are based onHanca so that the meanings of the chosen Chinese characters can reflect their business phil-osophy in a succinct, elegant manner, as may be illustrated by two world-famous SouthKorean conglomerates, Hyundai ‘modern times’ and Samsung ‘three stars’ [read: threebusiness goals], although in recent years there has been an increase in the use of Englishwords. Lastly, the emergence of China as a new economic and political superpower nodoubt weighs heavily on the minds of South Koreans, well known for making enormoussacrifices for their children’s education. This awareness may probably explain the recentpopularity of Hanca private schools among school children (or more accurately, amongtheir parents).

Kwuke ‘national language’ purification programmes

The Japanese occupation drove home to most Koreans, more than anything else, that theirlanguage and culture should never be taken for granted, and that alien languages and cul-tures could be imposed on them against their will. In particular, they were very cognizant ofthe existence of many Japanese or Sino-Japanese words in Korean, and they wanted verymuch to get rid of them. As early as the mid-nineteenth century, words denoting Westernobjects and concepts began to be borrowed into Korean from Japanese, which in turnrelied on Chinese morphemes to create them (but not necessarily mimicking Chineseexpressions). This trend persisted with some Sino-Japanese words replacing Sino-Koreanones (e.g. chello ‘railroad’, and nayoi ‘husband and wife’ becoming chelto and pwupwu,respectively). This kind of replacement, along with a number of native Japanese words(e.g. kabang ‘bag’, kwutwu ‘leather shoes’, kamani ‘straw bags used for storing huskedrice’, wailo ‘bribe’) made so great an impact on Korean during the 35 years of the Japanese

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occupation that some Sino-Japanese words are still being used without many Koreansrealizing their Japanese origins (e.g. Sino-Japanese word ocen ‘morning’ in lieu of Sino-Korean word sango).

In 1947, the MOE set up a national language purification committee, whose aim was tocreate native or Sino-Korean words with which to replace Japanese or Sino-Japanese words,and a year later, the committee published Wulimal tolo chacki ‘Reclaiming Our Language’.For example, Japanese words to be replaced and their replacements included kara→ kacca‘fake’, kisu→ humcip ‘scratch’ and shopwu→ kyelphan ‘show-down’, and Sino-Japanesewords to be replaced and their replacements included natayci→ pinchipthe ‘vacantsection’, chwuico→mwumcho ‘interrogation’ and thaykpay→ cippaytal ‘home delivery’.Some Hankul-only proponents advocated nativization of Sino-Korean words as well.Consequently, a large number of native Korean words were, in fact, coined with a view toreplacing Sino-Korean words (e.g. olm-sali ‘moving creature’ for tongmwul ‘animal’,penkay-ttalttali ‘lightening rattler’ for cenhwa ‘telephone’). Kim (1973, p. 348), for instance,reports that five volumes of such native words were published by a special committee (cf.Hannas, 1997, p. 65). But the majority of these native words were never accepted by thepublic, and this large-scale nativization movement soon petered out. As critics oftenpointed out, it was indeed extremely difficult and, in fact, naive to expect the public toaccept and use artificially created native words in place of such basic Sino-Korean wordsas tongmwul, cenhwa, etc. In 1976, President Chung-Hee Park – probably motivated by ahighly successful language purification programme in North Korea (e.g. Song, 2001,pp. 141–144) – issued an instruction for further lexical purification (i.e. the elimination ofloanwords), but it was not until the early 1990s that purification was carried out in earnestby the Ministry of Culture (and later the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism), withsome tangible outcomes. In particular, the Ministry engaged in four different types of puri-fication activity: (i) the establishment of a committee promoting the correct use of KoreanandHankul; (ii) the running of ‘Correct Korean’ lecture series touring the country, and visit-ing prisons, police stations, government departments, etc.; (iii) the lexical purification oftechnical terminology in various areas and (iv) the publication and dissemination of purifi-cation materials (Ministry of Culture and Tourism, 2002, pp. 98–108). These efforts werefurther augmented by the production of TV programmes, including Wulimal Wulikul ‘OurLanguage, Our Writing’ through the Educational Broadcasting Service from 2001. Thework done by the National Language Purification Committee, set up in 1999, included orga-nizing the ‘Correct Korean’ lecture series, public forums and debates, and advertising insubway stations and on outdoormegascreens. The ‘Correct Korean’ lecture series, beginningin 1999, involved Korean-language specialists and popular media personalities as peripateticlecturers. The lexical purification of foreign terminology was extended, as of 2001, to 17technological domains, with a view to replacing technical loanwords with Korean wordscomprehensible to the layperson. The numbers of loanwords as well as Sino-Koreanwords replaced by the purification programme are presented in Table 12.

Publications that appeared to promote lexical purification included Alumtapko cengkye-wun wulimal ‘Our beautiful and alluring language’, which was written, with explanatoryand usage notes, in order to retrieve from literary works Korean words that were beingor had been ‘forgotten’ and to return them into circulation. Mention must also be madeof the NIKL’s subsidiary website (www.malteo.net), which provides the public with infor-mation on lexical purification, and which also invites the public to pose questions or toprovide their input regarding words deemed to be in need of purification.

These purification efforts notwithstanding, the South Korean government may finditself in ‘King Canute’s shoes’, as it were, while attempting to stem the incoming tide

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of English (loan)words, given South Korea’s ‘obsession’ with English. The use of Englishwords carries high prestige and is accepted widely in South Korea as a marker of edu-cational and socio-economic achievement, just as had the use of Chinese charactersbeen in many preceding generations. By one recent count, more than 90% of over20,000 loanwords in South Korean are said to be of English stock (Song, 2005, p. 84).This is hardly unexpected in view of the close relationship between South Korea andthe USA, especially after the Korean War, as discussed in Part 1 under English in SouthKorea. It is not unlikely that the number of English loanwords will increase in years tocome, given the status of English as the global lingua franca and the alliance betweenSouth Korea and the USA.

Kwuke ‘national language’ dictionaries

Production of Korean dictionaries in South Korea had been undertaken mainly by theKorean Language Society and other academic organizations or commercial publishersuntil the establishment in 1991 of the NIKL. The most important – or the first ‘milestone’– dictionary that appeared during this period of little or no government-level involvementor financial support is the Korean Language Society’s six-volume Khun Sacen ‘TheGreat Dictionary’, the production of which was started in 1929 and brought to com-pletion in 1957. This dictionary contains 164,125 entries in total (i.e. 74,612 pureKorean words [45.5%], 85,527 Sino-Korean words [52.1%] and 3986 loanwords[2.4%]). Since then, other smaller dictionaries published by other academic organizationsor commercial publishers have appeared. In the absence of centralized efforts, however,different orthographic conventions were followed by different dictionaries and there wasalso a great deal of disparity between dictionaries in terms of lexical entries. Worthnoting in this context is that the Korean Language Society’s Wulimal Khun Sacen‘The Great Dictionary of Our Language’ (1992) – the revision of its Khun Sacen(1957) – also did not follow the standard orthographic conventions, resulting in muchconfusion among the public, in spite of the fact that it was the first dictionary projectever financed by the state. This state of affairs, however, was changed in 1992, when

Table 12. Loanwords replaced with Korean words (Choi,2003, p. 91).

Area Number of words replaced

Civil administration 9219Sports 1496Fashion design 1471Protected cultural assets 1174Computer technology 1068Forestry 997Daily life 751Painting (Arts) 738Mass media 627Election/politics 451Folk music 447Architecture 392Electrics/Electronics 353Sewing 331Banking/finance/economics 159Telecommunications 31

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the newly established NIKL undertook the production of a large-scale Korean-languagedictionary project, which eventually involved 8 years of work, with about 500 staffmembers and a budget of 9.2 billion won (equivalent to US$ 8.5 million).29 Thethree-volume Phyocwun Kwuke Tay Sacen ‘The Great Dictionary of Standard Korean’,published in 1999 on the basis of an aggregate corpus of over 50 million words, contains500,000 entries, including Standard South Korean, North Korean, Old Korean and non-standard Korean words. One defining characteristic of this major dictionary is said to bethe consistent use of the standard orthographic conventions (Choi, 2003, p. 128). Thisdictionary has also been accessible online since 2000. A CD-ROM version of the dic-tionary appeared in 2001.

Kwuke ‘national language’ education in schools

The details of Kwuke education were already provided in Korean: Kwuke ‘the nationallanguage’ (Part 2). The national language education policy is the responsibility of theMEST (or previously, the MOE) in the context of the national curriculum. However, afew words are in order about who publishes Korean-language textbooks, and also aboutHanca ‘Chinese characters’ vis-à-vis Hankul in the national language curriculum. Sinceindependence from Japan in 1945, the production of school textbooks has been underthe direct or indirect control of the MOE/MEST. There have always been three differentcategories of school textbooks: Category One (Kwukceng), Category Two (Kemceng)and Category Three (Inceng) (Revised School Textbooks Regulations, 2008). The author-ship (and copyright) of Category One textbooks belong(s) to the MEST. Category Two text-books are produced by commercial publishers authorized by the Minister of Education,Science and Technology. Category Three textbooks are published by commercial publish-ers accredited by the Minister of Education, Science and Technology. (The major differencebetween Category Two and Category Three is that textbooks in the latter category are pro-duced for subject areas not supported by those in the other two categories, e.g. region-specific or uncommonly taught subject areas.) In this way, the MEST maintains itscontrol, direct or indirect, over the production of all school textbooks. The MOE operatedits own textbook publishing company until 1999, when the latter was privatized as theKorea Authorized Textbook Company (www.ktbook.com). In addition, there are manyother commercial publishers – as many as 17 – that produce Categories Two and Three text-books (e.g. see http://cutis.mest.go.kr for details).

Until very recently, the largest proportion of school textbooks had been written and pro-duced directly by the MOE/MEST, but in an attempt to increase textbook choices forschools, teachers and students a gradual shift from Category One to Category Two orThree textbooks has been taking place to the effect that it is now only at the primaryschool level that the majority of the textbooks (i.e. 91%) are still written by the MEST(Revised School Textbooks Regulations, 2008). For the middle and high-school levels,in contrast, the majority of the textbooks are of Category Two and Category Three, i.e.92% and 97% at middle and high-school level, respectively. Moreover, the number ofCategory Three textbooks increases sigmoidally from primary to middle to high-schoollevel (i.e. from 0% to 1.6% to almost 41.5%). Thus, all the primary school Korean-languagetextbooks are of Category One. In contrast, the middle and high-school Korean-languagetextbooks all belong to Category Two.

As noted earlier in Hanca education and use (Part 3), the government announced itsplan to abolish the use of Hanca in 1968, as a consequence of which the parallel use ofHankul and Hanca was discontinued in primary and middle school Korean-language

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textbooks in 1970. In the same year, however, Hanca was introduced as an independentsubject at the middle school level, while it continued to be part and parcel of Korean-language education at the high-school level. In 1975, Hanca became an independentsubject also at the high-school level although Korean-language textbooks resumed the par-allel use of Hankul and Hanca at both the middle and high-school levels. Primary schoolKorean-language textbooks, however, continued to be written in Hankul only. As notedin Hanca: Chinese characters (Part 2), the seventh or 1997 revised national curriculumdowngraded Hanca education at the middle school level from an elective to a discretion-ary-elective. Prior to the seventh revised national curriculum, Hanca had been a compul-sory subject at the high-school level but was reclassified as an elective in that revision.What this would imply is that the parallel use of Hankul and Hanca does not exist inschool education, but oddly enough, the reality could not be more different. At leastKorean-language textbooks at the middle and high-school level are still reported to useHanca, albeit written in parentheses following Hankul words (e.g. illustrated in (3) in Par-allel use of Hankul and Hanca (Part 1)), and to a much lesser extent than before the down-grading of Hanca education in the national curriculum (J.-t. Song, personalcommunication). In other words, while Hanca is no longer compulsory in the currentnational curriculum, the practice of mixing Hankul and Hanca in Korean-language text-books persists, albeit in greatly attenuated and parenthetical form.

Digitization/computerization of the Korean language

As already discussed in Digital media (Part 1), South Korea is very advanced, by theworld’s standards, in embracing computer and information/communication technology.By 1995, the Hankul (uni)code was already at the stage of implementation, and sub-sequently, Hankul and Computer Company’s ‘H^nkul’ and Samsung’s ‘Hwunmincengum’font systems, through an agreement with Microsoft, were rendered fully compatible withthe latter’s Word 2000 (and its subsequent versions). The milestone in South Korea’sdigitization and computerization at the governmental level is undoubtedly the Twenty-First-Century Sejong Project (1998–2007) (www.sejong.or.kr). This project was thegovernment’s initiative to enable South Koreans to use the computer competently and toexchange information with each other in Korean (i.e. Hankul), with a view to makingSouth Korea a leader in the world’s information technology as well as a globally competi-tive nation. The project entailed machine translation (e.g. from English to Korean), thebuilding of the National Korean Corpus and other Korean-language databases, thepublication of digital Korean dictionaries, including Standard North Korean and othernon-standard dialects as well as foreign languages, and standardization of technical termi-nology (Choi, 2003, p. 150). The Twenty-First-Century Sejong Project was carried out bythe Ministry of Culture and Tourism with the support of the NIKL and other concernedacademic organizations on a budget of 18.7 billion won (equivalent to US$ 17.2million). The next stage of the project is reported to be in the offing (according to theNIKL at www.korean.go.kr), although the details thereof have not yet been published.

Two standard varieties of Korean: implications for a unified Korea

As discussed in the previous subsection, one of the digital dictionaries developed by theTwenty-First-Century Sejong Project is that of Standard North Korean. The inclusion ofStandard North Korean in the (digital) dictionary project was thought to be needed in antici-pation of South Korea’s (eventual) reunification with North Korea. Since the post-World

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War II separation, there has been virtually no interaction or communication between the twoKoreas with the exception of intermittent government talks, and there are, not surprisingly,ample signs of linguistic divergence between Standard South Korean (Phyocwune) andStandard North Korean (Mwunhwae) (see Song, 2001 for details). This linguistic schism,as it were, has recently been brought home to many South Koreans by the arrival ofNorth Korean refugees (called Saythemin ‘newly settled persons’), who are reported tohave a great deal of difficulty with linguistic differences between Phyocwune and Mwunh-wae, including many loanwords used in South Korea, especially those from English. Notsurprisingly, one of the foci in South Korea’s language planning and policy is NorthKorean Mwunhwae, as opposed to South Korean Phyocwune (and how to deal with theirdivergence in anticipation of the (inevitable) reunification of North and South Korea).

Since the First International Conference on Korean Language Computerization (held inChina) in 1994, a series of international academic conferences have been held to discuss anumber of linguistic issues or concerns between Standard South Korean and StandardNorth Korean. There have also been inter-Korea conferences sponsored by the SouthKorean government and attended by North and South Korean (and also Chinese) scholars.The clear consensus emerging from these conferences is that no orthographic or other lin-guistic changes or measures should be introduced that will contribute to further divergencebetween the two standard varieties of Korean. Noteworthy in this context is the Inter-national Conference on the Recovery of the Linguistic Homogeneity of North and SouthKorea, jointly hosted by South Korea’s NIKL and North Korea’s Choson Academy ofSocial Sciences (first held in Beijing, China in December, 2001). Probably, the most tangi-ble outcome of this kind of academic exchange and collaboration is the publication in 1999of Phyocwun Kwuke Tay Sacen ‘The Great Dictionary of Standard Korean’, previouslymentioned in Kwuke ‘national language’ dictionaries. This dictionary, produced by theNIKL, contains as many as 70,000 North Korean entries. Useful and insightful as suchinter-Korea conferences are, they may, more frequently than not, be susceptible to the vag-aries of the relationship between the North and South Korean governments as well as thoseof regional or international political situations. Understandably, what has so far been carriedout under linguistic reunification is largely descriptive work (i.e. documenting differencesbetween Standard South Korean and Standard North Korean), rather than reformative orprescriptive work, which can only begin after the political reunification of the two Koreas.

Internationalization of the Korean language

First of all, a few words are in order to explain what is meant by ‘internationalization of theKorean language’ (Hankwukeuy Sekyehwa). One of the primary goals of South Korea’slanguage planning and policy is to promote Korean on a global scale, as part of theoverall objective of conserving the Korean language, (South) Korea’s number one culturalasset. For instance, this overall objective can be achieved, it is argued (e.g. Lee, 2009,p. 62), by increasing the number of people who understand the Korean language. Thus,not only Koreans who speak Korean as their mother tongue but also all those who studyit as a foreign or second language count insofar as the objective in question is concerned.This is a global perspective on the dissemination of the Korean language indeed.

There are a number of government departments or agencies that have, from differentdirections, involved themselves in the global spread of the Korean language: e.g. KF,NIKL, IKLF, Korean Education Centers and Korean Cultural Centers. For instance, theKF, under the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade, may, among other activities,promote international exchange programmes between South Korea and other countries

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through Korean-language courses, whereas the NIKL is interested in promoting the Koreanlanguage through its own language and cultural programmes. While these different govern-ment departments or agencies had more or less independently been promoting the Koreanlanguage internationally for their own purposes, it was not until 1998 that the national gov-ernment started to put much effort and money into the internationalization of Korean. In1998, the national government established the International Korean Language Committee,which subsequently proposed a 6-year plan for the global spread of Korean. Consequently,the national government established the IKLF in 2001. It needs to be noted that the SouthKorean government began to take serious interest (read: financial support) in the internatio-nalization of Korean in the late 1990s, when so-called Hanlyu ‘Korean Wave’ was begin-ning to emerge. The KoreanWave describes the unprecedented penetration of South Koreanpop culture (i.e. pop music, TV dramas and movies) initially into China, Japan, Taiwan,Hong Kong, Vietnam and other Asian countries, and now also into North America andWestern Europe (see Chua & Iwabuchi, 2008; Russell, 2008 on the Korean Wave; seethe video clip at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tt-IdeJIGqI for a glimpse of theKorean Wave phenomenon). It seems as if the South Korean government had been piggy-backing the internationalization of Korean on the Korean Wave. Indeed there is anecdotalevidence that people in these countries, influenced by the Korean Wave, are also becominginterested to learn Korean (e.g. in order to sing Korean pop songs or to watch Koreanmovies and soap operas).

The two most important organizations in the global spread of the Korean language arethe NIKL and the IKLF, as discussed in Hankwuke: Korean for the ‘others’ (Part 2). Therole of the NIKL is to provide academic research necessary for developing teachingmaterials and learner dictionaries, whereas the role of the IKLF is to do the groundworkfor the dissemination of the Korean language throughout the world, although the bound-ary between these two agencies (and also the KF) sometimes seems to be blurred, at leastto the outsider (see the ensuing discussion). The IKLF carries out its activities in threemain areas. First, it aims to develop Korean language materials and lesson-basedlearner dictionaries. Second, it aims to train KFL/KSL teachers by developing and oper-ating standardized training programmes. The IKLF is also authorized by the governmentto issue KFL/KSL teaching qualifications by administering qualification examinations.Third, it aims to develop diverse programmes for the internationalization of the Koreanlanguage, including the development and maintenance of Korean-language portal sitesand the organizing of international KFL/KSL conferences. Also refer to Hankwuke:Korean for the ‘others’ (Part 2) for the IKLF’s other activities: namely, SejongHaktang and Nuli-Sejong Haktang schools. No less actively involved in the internationa-lization of Korean is the NIKL. For instance, in its 2007–2011 Basic Plans on the NationalLanguage Development (NIKL, 2006) – commissioned, under the National LanguageBasic Law, by the Minister of Culture, Sports and Tourism – the internationalization ofthe Korean language is highlighted as one of the NIKL’s three core tasks. The NIKLsees North-East Asia as a ‘launch pad’ for its internationalization activities, whereasthe IKLF does not seem to have any regional focus. Moreover, a plan is reported to bein the pipeline to reconfigure the IKLF into a new foundation, i.e. ‘Sejong Haktang Foun-dation’ so that it will specialize in the administration of Sejong Haktang schools (J.-i.Kwon, personal communication).

The NIKL, the IKLF and other government agencies (e.g. KF, Korean EducationCenters, Korean Cultural Centers) all seem to be involved in the internationalization ofthe Korean language, sometimes almost to the point of some overlapping in their coreactivities. While this overlapping may be more apparent than real, the situation is rather

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unusual and one cannot help wondering why there has not been a centralized attempt tocoordinate various activities to promote the global spread of Korean (i.e. in a singlegovernment agency), especially when these agencies are all funded by the nationalgovernment.

Part 4: South Korea’s language policy: whither from here?

As mentioned in the section on Language policy and planning (in Introduction), there aretwo main types of language planning: status and corpus planning (Kloss, 1968; but cf.Cooper, 1989). Most of the language planning and policy issues identified in the NationalLanguage Basic Law, as discussed in Part 3, concern corpus planning, i.e. orthography, theparallel use of Hankul and Hanca, production of dictionaries (which presupposes languagestandardization and involves digitization/computerization) and language purification. Thishardly comes as a surprise because as noted at the beginning of Part 3, which dialect is tobe chosen as Standard (South) Korean (i.e. status planning) has never been an issue for(South) Korea. Thus, much greater focus on corpus than status planning over the pastdecades is not unexpected. Nevertheless, the Korean-language education in the nationalcurriculum and the internationalization of the Korean-language fall under status planning(or precisely, language implementation) in that they relate directly to the spread of(Standard South) Korean. In the remaining part of the monograph, language policy andplanning issues that South Korea will have to come to grips with, or confront, in thefuture will be discussed:

(i) (linguistic) reunification of North and South Korea,(ii) the status and role of English,(iii) the rise of China as a regional and global superpower and(iv) emergent multilingualism.

As will be suggested later, concerns or problems relating to the issues in (ii), (iii) and (iv)arise from South Korea’s lack of a general, as opposed to a Korean-specific, language policy(and also the absence of a single government agency dealing with general language plan-ning and policy matters).

Linguistic reunification of North and South Korea

The issue of ‘linguistic reunification’ for North and South Korea, one of the areas identifiedin the National Language Basic Law, potentially raises a status planning and policy issue ofa serious magnitude indeed. The possibility of reunification – however remote it may seemat present – points to a number of language issues which a unified Korea will have to dealwith, e.g. the choice between Standard South Korean and Standard North Korean, thechoice between South Korea’s and North Korea’s orthographic systems, the developmentof a single national Korean-language curriculum (e.g. Song, 2005, pp. 175–176), and theuse of the many Sino-Korean words and (English) loanwords in South Korea, becausereunification necessarily leads to linguistic convergence (Clyne, 1997b, p. 478). Northand South Korea, as a reunified nation, will be put in a position to work out these andmany other related issues after decades of independent language planning and policy.The ‘linguistic reunification’ of North and South Korea will probably be the biggest chal-lenge in language planning and policy in the entire history of Korea. There will probably bewinners and losers, and the losers will have to bear the social, economic, political and edu-cational consequences of the linguistic reunification. For instance, when it comes to which

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of the two standard varieties of Korean is going to be selected for a unified Korea, StandardNorth Korean will lose out to Standard South Korean because there are far more SouthKoreans than North Koreans (not to mention the fact that South Korea is much wealthierthan North Korea),30 and also because Standard South Korean had for centuries been Stan-dard Korean until 1966 when North Korea chose the Pyongyang dialect as Standard NorthKorean (see note 21 for the ideological justification of this choice). Indeed it is not imposs-ible to have a glimpse of some of these consequences of Standard South Korean winningover Standard North Korean when one considers various difficulties, including linguisticones, faced by North Korean refugees in South Korea. The social, political and educationalimplications of the linguistic reunification have hardly been considered or widely discussedin South Korea; what has so far been done in this area is, as previously noted, largely at thelevel of documentation, that is, the identification and explanation of differences between thetwo standard varieties.

Incidentally, this ‘linguistic reunification’ militates against the view expressed by theCzech linguist Jiri Neustupný (1965, 1970, 1974) among others: the policy approach(akin to status planning) and the cultivation approach (akin to corpus planning) are associ-ated with less developed communities and modern industrial societies, respectively. Thechallenge that reunification poses for North and South Korea has nothing to do with tech-nological or industrial development but everything to do with the (elimination of) politico-ideological division. Moreover, Neustupný (1970) claims that the two kinds of approachcan be interpreted as an evolutionary sequence in analogy of the evolutionary sequenceof less to more technologically developed: first policy and then cultivation. However, thechoice between Standard North Korean and Standard South Korean will inevitably placethe policy approach after the cultivation approach on Neustupný’s evolutionary scale,because language replanning will be inevitable in the event of reunification. Indeed, asClyne (1997b, p. 477) observes, language replanning tends to be brought about by majorpolitical upheavals such as reunification or international political realignment. Involvedin such language replanning is the process of ‘undoing’ or ‘relaxing the way in whichthe language had previously been planned’ (Clyne, 1997a, p. 1). This ‘undoing’ processwill then occur prior to, or concurrently with, the ‘redoing’ of language planning, bothstatus and corpus planning (or policy and cultivation), in order to adapt the language tothe new politico-ideological milieu. The ineluctable conclusion is, therefore, that languageplanning process is iterative or cyclic (also Kaplan & Baldauf, 1997, p. 49), rather thanevolutionary as Neustupný claims.

Need for a general language policy

The issue of (linguistic) reunification of North and South Korea necessarily involves theKorean language, but the remaining three issues do not concern the language, at leastnot directly. While there are many indications of South Korea’s awareness of theseissues (e.g. NIKL’s 2006–2011 National Language Development Action Plans, publishedin 2006), there do not seem to be any clear policy statements or planning measures, atthe governmental level, to address them in an adequate manner. In point of fact, theytend to be discussed only tangentially, if not haphazardly, within the context of SouthKorea’s national language planning and policy. This actually does not come as a total sur-prise because, while it has a national language policy, South Korea has no general languagepolicy as such. The South Korean government’s workhorse in language planning and policyis the NIKL, whose business is the Korean language (and writing). Thus, whenever it raisessuch issues as emergent multilingualism (e.g. bilingual families or migrant workers) or the

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status and role of English in South Korea (e.g. frequent use of English words in the media),the NIKL does so only with respect to its main objective of promoting and developing theKorean language. The three issues to be discussed below, however, can potentially behighly significant, in educational, economic, political and social terms, for South Korea’sfuture. To address them properly, South Korea may need a general language policy, ifnot a central government agency empowered to develop one and implement it.

Future status and role of English

The high status and the important role of English in South Korean society are indisputable.As discussed elsewhere in the monograph, English is unquestionably the most importantforeign language in South Korea, whether in education, employment or popular culture,to the effect that English has, arguably, trivialized the Hanca (Chinese characters) issue,hotly debated in previous decades. As Song (2011) argues, however, English-language edu-cation has become a serious issue of educational and social inequality in South Korea. Thecountry has been spending a large proportion of its national income on public or privateEnglish-language education when the majority of South Koreans have no opportunity orneed to use English (in everyday communication). The so-called ‘English Divide’ nowexists between the rich (e.g. those who can afford private English-language education over-seas or delivered locally by native speakers of English) and the poor (e.g. those who canaccess English-language education through the national education system only).31 SouthKorea’s government, while recognizing the importance of English in its national curriculum,does not seem to have a good grasp of, let alone a policy on, the (future) status and role ofEnglish in South Korean society. Questions need to be raised and seriously debated, forinstance, as to whether and how South Korean society as a whole is prepared to continueto invest profusely and unproductively in English-language education when there aremore important issues (i.e. poverty, unemployment, public health, ageing population, pol-lution, youth problems, North Korean refugees, and last but not least, reunification costs).32

Future status and role of Chinese and community languages

South Korea does not seem to have a clear idea of how to address the emergence of China interms of language planning and policy. True, there is provision within the national curricu-lum for Hanca education and Chinese as one of the seven foreign languages taught at thehigh-school level, albeit as an elective subject. Beyond that, however, South Korea does nothave any language or other policy on the language of its powerful northern neighbour.South Korea needs to have a clearly articulated policy on Chinese, a language possiblyfar more important, politically and economically, in the long run than English has ever been.

More generally speaking, South Korea does not have any policy on its emergent multi-lingualism, either. South Korea has recently witnessed an influx of migrant workers andforeign brides, particularly from other parts of Asia. These people bring a number oflanguages to the country, challenging the popular perception that South Korea is a monolin-gual nation. It is true that South Korea is a monolingual nation to all intents and purposes, butit is equally true that the country has never before witnessed such a high level of multilingu-alism in its territory. While the issue of language maintenance and shift really does not arisefor the majority of migrant workers (e.g. maids, factory and construction workers), who tendto stay, with their families left behind in their home countries, only for a short period of time(e.g. 2 or 3 years), things are very different for foreign brides who choose to live in SouthKorea. To such foreign brides, the issue of bilingualism is real. For instance, how do they

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maintain their languages, especially when they tend to live in relative isolation from otherspeakers of their languages?; how do their children maintain the ‘maternal’ languages?This issue is serious because so-called ‘multicultural family’ children (i.e. born out of inter-national marriages) tend to be cared for, until they reach school age, by their mothers whomay not be able to speak Korean well; moreover, unlike most South Korean mothers,these mothers cannot help them with school work because of their lack of proficiency inKorean (Seo, 2009, p. 35). (Their South Korean fathers may also have to simplify theirspeech at home accordingly.) Thus, it is not realistic to assume that these ‘multiculturalfamily’ children know Korean as well as other South Korean children (especially inreading and writing) when they start school (e.g. Cho, 2009). In South Korea, however,Hankwuke (i.e. KSL) lies well outside the purview of the national education system. More-over, as pointed out earlier, there are only 34 schools, out of over 11,000 schools, in thewhole country that were reported to have developed and offered KSL on their own initiative.As explained in Hankwuke: Korean for the ‘others’ (Part 2), KSL tends to be deliveredthrough multicultural family and migrant worker support centres organized and operatedby municipal, provincial and district governments, and various NGOs throughout thecountry. KSL courses offered by these support centres, however, are not designed to caterfor children; their focus is on adult learners (Cho, 2009, p. 115). Not surprisingly, mostKSL materials are also written for adult learners (Oh, 2009, p. 7). Thus, the sense of alien-ation felt by ‘multicultural family’ children without an adequate level of proficiency inKorean upon entering school is too palpable to be ignored (e.g. Oh, 2009, p. 3). Recent dis-cussion documents from the MEST seem to address the existence of bilingual children inschools, but the general impression from such documents is that the question of whetherto offer KSL is more or less left to individual schools. (This may perhaps explain the lownumber of KSL offering schools.) At any rate, unless it is recognized as a school subject,KSL may only be made available to bilingual children in addition to, or outside of,normal school hours, if it is ever offered at all (Cho, 2009, pp. 113–114). Moreover, theseven foreign languages that high-school students are allowed to choose from include nocommunity languages – e.g. Filipino, Khmer, Mongolian, Thai, Uzbek and Vietnamese –with the exception of Chinese (taught because of its regional and global importance). Insome countries (e.g. Australia, the USA), in contrast, students may be able to take a commu-nity or heritage language for the purposes of education qualification requirements. Indeed, ifSouth Korea as a whole society is supportive of, and is willing to embrace, multilingualism,considerationmay need to be given to at least some of the community languages with respectto their possible inclusion in the national curriculum. Once again, this and other relatedissues have not been explored or discussed within the context of a general language planningand policy, which simply does not exist. Indeed as Cho (2009, p. 135) laments, there do notseem to be any government documents that address multilingualism in schools (in particularKSL for ‘multicultural family’ children) as a mid- or long-term issue instead of somethingthat ‘has appeared out of the blue [translation by the author]’ as an urgent or pressing matterto be dealt with on an ad hoc basis. In this context, the establishment of the Central Multi-cultural Education Center (www.damunwha-edu.or.kr) is instructive. This organization wasbrought into existence in 2007, as part of Seoul National University’s Center for EducationalResearch, in order to research multicultural education policy matters, to develop learningmaterials for bilingual children and teaching materials for their teachers, and to establishthe infrastructure for training (school) teachers in multicultural education. One of itsprimary purposes is to serve as an intermediary between the national government and theeducation sector so that what individual schools do (or do not do) in terms of bilingual edu-cation can be embedded in the overall context of whatever policies the national government

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may have in place. While this is admirable and should be supported, the major problem withit is that the national government does not have a policy on multilingualism in schools.(Interestingly enough, the Center’s mission statement does not mention any intention to per-suade the national government to develop a policy on multilingualism in schools.) Onceagain, this is a consequence of the absence of a general language policy in South Korea .Perhaps, South Korea should take a leaf from Australia’s book when it comes to communitylanguages. To begin with, Australia has a much longer history of, andmuch more experiencewith, immigration than South Korea has. In the early 1990s, the Australian Federal Govern-ment developed a policy of ‘Productive Diversity’, under which the cultural and linguisticresources of community languages in the workforce were emphasized or valued as nationalassets to be harnessed in trade, business and tourism (Clyne, 2005, p. 157; also Kipp, Clyne,& Pauwels, 1995, pp. 7–20). While Australia’s Productive Diversity policy, admittedly, hadlimited impact, the average finalist in the 1987 Australian Export Awards, for instance, wasreported to have employed four times as many fluent multilinguals as the average non-fin-alist (Clyne, 2005, p. 37). Moreover, Australia has for more than two decades had a generallanguage policy in place (i.e. Lo Bianco, 1987) – whether or not this policy has beenimplemented successfully is a different matter altogether; the point being made here isthat Australia has a kind of baseline in its general language policy. South Korea, with itsexport-driven economy, cannot afford to ignore the value of the cultural and linguisticresources of its minority-language communities, however small in size they may be.

South Korea’s language policy and planning: looking back and ahead

The first four or five decades of South Korea’s language policy and planning can be bestdescribed perhaps as reliance on ‘free market forces’ (laissez-faire), i.e. minimum govern-ment involvement. There having been no language planning and policy agency at the gov-ernment level, South Korea’s government had, far more frequently than not, found itselfcaught between opposing NGOs with divergent agendas. This state of affairs could notbe better highlighted by the controversy over orthographic reforms and the (parallel) useof (Hankul and) Hanca. Things started to change for the better when the NIKL was estab-lished in 1991, a milestone in South Korea’s language planning and policy. For the first timein South Korea’s history, there was now a central government agency, designed specificallyto address language planning and policy issues or concerns. In a way, the government’s‘delay’ in establishing such a central language planning/policy agency is quite understand-able because it had been far more preoccupied with the nation’s economic developmentthan with anything else (e.g. North Korea wealthier than South Korea until the late1960s). Thus, it may not be a coincidence that the NIKL came into existence in 1991,when South Korea had become one of the world’s affluent nations. Milestone or no mile-stone, however, the NIKL’s business is strictly the Korean language and nothing else. Thus,its language planning and policy measures all relate to the Korean language. Wheneversomething other than the Korean language (e.g. English, community languages) is raisedor discussed in its language planning and policy (documents), it is always in the contextof the promotion and development of the Korean language. This should come as no surprisebecause the name of the NIKL, i.e. Kwuklip Kwuke Won bears Kwuke ‘the nationallanguage’, after all. However, there are important issues or concerns such as discussedearlier that have little to do with the national language per se, and they must be exploredand discussed, because of their educational, social, economic and/or political significancefor South Korea.33 However, until it has its own government agency to deal with such non-Korean-language issues, the South Korean government can only go back to its old ways:

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reliance on free market forces. Multilingualism in schools is a case in point. There are anumber of government ministries, municipal, provincial or district government depart-ments, NGOs and academic organizations, all involved separately and independently indealing with multilingualism in schools, instead of one national government agencymaking a concerted effort or coordinating the projects or activities carried out by multiplestakeholders (cf. Cho, 2009, p. 136 for a similar view). For instance, Cho (2009, pp. 122–128) points out that as many as five government ministries – i.e. the MEST, the Ministry ofCulture, Sports and Tourism, the Ministry of Health andWelfare, the Ministry of Labor, andthe MOJ – are involved, in one way or another, in the teaching of Korean to foreign brides,migrant workers and their children. Unfortunately, the objectives of these government min-istries do not coincide, more often than not, bringing their projects or activities into directcompetition with each other (Cho, 2009, p. 136). The low level of proficiency in Koreanamong children from international marriages or migrant families is an issue for theMEST’s implementation of the national curriculum while it is an issue of basic humanrights for the MOJ (i.e. equal access to education). Consequently, teaching of Korean tothese children may be approached from different perspectives (e.g. teaching Korean tothe exclusion of other languages vs. teaching KSL). Moreover, these government ministriestend to contract their work out to academic organizations (e.g. universities) and to otherNGOs, which in turn may have their own agendas and orientations. Such a disparitybetween these different ministries is not totally unexpected in the absence of a single gov-ernment policy on multilingualism in schools and generally, in society. Of course, there isno guarantee that the number of bilingual children born out of multicultural or migrantfamilies will increase over the next 10 years or so, especially in view of South Korea’srecession (i.e. there may be fewer foreign brides or migrant workers because of SouthKorea’s economic uncertainty). Thus, it may be argued that the government should bewise enough not to be in a hurry to do anything substantial or concrete about multilingual-ism in schools. Moreover, it may be argued that the number of children born out of inter-national marriages at present is far too small to warrant government involvement, anyway.Nonetheless multilingualism in schools is real for all those involved, i.e. bilingual children,and their parents and teachers, and should thus be worthy of public attention. These andother issues, unrelated to the national language per se, will continue to challenge SouthKorean society in the age of international population flows (e.g. migrant workers,foreign brides), international relationships and geopolitical winds of change (e.g. Englishas a global lingua franca, the rise of China as a global superpower). Probably, it is hightime that South Korea had a general language policy as well as a national governmentagency to develop and implement such a policy through a concerted effort.

The greatest challenge in Korea’s history of language planning and policy is likely to bethe ‘linguistic reunification’ of North and South Korea. Independent of its sister polity in thesouth, North Korea has implemented a wide range of language policy measures, e.g. ortho-graphic changes, lexical purification, grammatical and stylistic changes, elimination ofChinese characters from the writing system, reinstatement of Chinese characters in thenational curriculum,34 etc., under the sole tutelage of its former leader Il-Sung Kim(1912–1994) (for a detailed discussion of North Korea’s language policy, see Kaplan &Baldauf, 2011; C.-W. Kim 1978, 1991; Kumatani, 1990; Song, 2001). Thus, almost allthe language policy measures of North Korea have stemmed directly from the two speeches(or kyosi ‘enlightening instructions’) that the leader himself gave to North Korean linguistsin 1964 and 1966 – in emulation of his Soviet mentor Joseph Stalin (Kaplan & Baldauf,2011, p. 155). Following Kim’s death in 1994, however, North Korea’s language policyand planning seem to have all but stalled (e.g. Kaplan & Baldauf, 2011). There is no

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evidence that his successor and son Jong-Il Kim (1941–2011) had shown any interest inlanguage planning and policy before or since he officially became North Korea’s head ofstate in 1998. Nor is there any evidence that noticeable changes to North Korea’s languagepolicy have taken place since Il-Sung Kim’s death. In 2010, concrete steps had already beentaken to ensure that Jong-Il Kim’s youngest son, Jong-Un Kim (1983/1984?–), inherit theleadership of the country in the event of his father’s death, incapacity or retirement.Whether North Korea’s heir apparent, like his grandfather, will take absolute control ofNorth Korea’s language policy, or like his father, he will detach himself from languagepolicy/planning matters remains uncertain – not to mention the fact that it is not certainwhether the carefully planned nepotistic succession will become a reality. Perhaps whatis certain is that these uncertainties will not make things easy for South Korea, as it preparesitself for eventual reunification with North Korea.

Frequently used abbreviations

CSAT: College Scholastic Ability TestIKLF: International Korean Language FoundationKEDI: Korean Educational Development InstituteKF: Korea FoundationKFL: Korean as a Foreign LanguageKICE: Korea Institute of Curriculum and EvaluationKSL: Korean as a Second LanguageMEST: Ministry of Education, Science and TechnologyMOE: Ministry of EducationMOJ: Ministry of JusticeNIKL: National Institute of the Korean Language

Romanization

The Yale Romanization System is used throughout the monograph, except for proper namesthat are well established in other romanization systems (e.g. Sejong, Yi Choson, Tae-JungKim, Il-Sung Kim, Seoul, Pyongyang, etc.).

Acknowledgements and dedicationI am greatly indebted to Jae-tag Song (a high-school teacher) for sending me a box full of nationalcurriculum booklets, tracking down statistical data on imported books and sharing with me his experi-ence at the coal face, and to Professor Jae-il Kwon (Director of the NIKL/Seoul National University)for promptly answering my queries about the NIKL and emailing me various language policy docu-ments produced by the NIKL. I am also grateful to two anonymous CILP referees for their commentsand suggestions. None of these people are responsible for any errors of fact or interpretation. Thismonograph is dedicated to the memory of John Platt and Michael Clyne, who were both inspirationalsources of sociolinguistics for me as an undergraduate student at Monash University (Melbourne).

Notes1. The situation in North and South Korea may perhaps be compared with that which existed in

former East and West Germany. This, however, is not a fair comparison since even before theBerlin wall was torn down, East Germans knew about life on the other side from West Germantelevision. By contrast, North Koreans cannot watch South Korean television, and few daretune in to South Korean radio stations. Similarly, South Koreans do not have direct access toNorth Korean television, although they can nowadays view a limited amount of North Korean

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news broadcast on television. Also refer to C.-W. Kim (1991, pp. 252–254) on why and how thesituation in Korea differs from that in former East and West Germany, or in China and Taiwan.

2. Kaplan and Baldauf (1997, pp. 113–117, 121) suggest a more domain-specific label, i.e.‘language-in-education planning’, in lieu of Cooper’s ‘acquisition planning’.

3. For example, cenki written in Hankul can have at least six different meanings (i.e. electricity,biography, former period, aforementioned, turning point and military history), each of whichcan be represented by different Chinese characters.

4. The magnitude of South Korea’s spending on private English language education can perhapsbe better appreciated when compared, for example, with the R&D expenditure of other devel-oped countries (for example, well under 2% of Australia’s GDP in 2002; just over 1% of NewZealand’s GDP in 2004).

5. J. S.-Y. Park (2009) does not define what he means by ‘active usage’; it is clear from his bookthat he means the same kind of English usage as documented by Baik (1992, 1994) and Shim(1994), i.e. occasional use of English words or expressions in a limited number of domains suchas TV commercials, movie titles, brand names, etc. Thus, Park’s (2009) ‘active usage’ is equiv-alent to Haarmann’s (1986) ‘impersonal bilingualism’ or Blommaert’s (2010) ‘emblematic use’of a foreign language.

6. Of course, it cannot be assumed that these US$ amounts correspond proportionally to thenumbers of imported copies or titles, the data on which are unavailable. Nonetheless, the differ-ences in monetary value give one an idea as to from which countries South Korea imports moreor fewer books and printed materials.

7. South Korea’s state expenditure on education accounts for about 4% of the GNP, but the totalcosts are considerably higher, when private after-school instruction is taken into consideration,i.e. 12% or up to 15% of the GNP (Seth, 2002, p. 187; Sorensen, 1994, p. 22); as much as 30%of total household income is estimated to be spent on education (Seth, 2002, pp. 184,187).South Korea spends a larger share of its income on education than any other nation in theworld (Seth, 2002, p. 5).

8. That is, 72% or 60% of South Korea’s or Japan’s aggregate Internet connections, respectively,have Internet connection speed above 5 Mps.

9. The DOI is based on three clusters of Information and Communication Technologies (or ITCs):opportunity, infrastructure and utilization (www.itu.int/ITU-D/ict/doi/index.html).

10. For instance, Andes and Castro (2009, p. 2) report that among the G-20 countries, South Koreahas made the largest investment in information and telecommunications (ICT) technology, allo-cating 1.1% of GDP to ICT-related stimulus investments. By comparison, the USA and Japanhave spent 0.7% and 0.3% of GDP on ICT-related stimulus, respectively.

11. Some of these multilingual websites have their Chinese-medium content produced in simplifiedas well as in traditional Chinese characters.

12. In South Korea, kindergarten education is not provided by the state. That said, the national kin-dergarten curriculum has been in place since 1969, the latest revision thereof undertaken in2007. One of the focus areas in the national kindergarten curriculum is the four basic skillsin Korean (i.e. speaking, listening, reading and writing). One of the goals of the 2007 revisednational kindergarten curriculum in Korean is to enhance continuity between kindergartenand year 1 of primary school (i.e. including the four basic language skills). Since it is neithercompulsory at the time of writing nor provided by the state, kindergarten education will notbe discussed in this monograph. For further discussion on the national kindergarten curriculumin the Korean language, see Kim and Yoon (2009).

13. In May 2011, the South Korean government announced that as from 2012, one year of kinder-garten or nursery school will be part of the country’s compulsory education (Dong-A Ilbo, 2May 2011). Also included in the announcement was the plan to provide education subsidiesto families with children in kindergartens or nursery schools.

14. Kaplan and Baldauf (1997, p. 151) point out, based on proficiency studies, that languages suchas French, German and Italian take between 700 and 800 h, and languages such as Chinese,Japanese and Korean between 2700 and 2900 h to acquire a Level 3 in the four main languageskills (i.e. listening, speaking, reading and writing) on the Australian Second Language Profi-ciency Rating Scales. Level 3 is defined as general social proficiency.

15. For instance, refer to Laufer (1992), and Laufer and Nation (1995) on the correlation betweenvocabulary size and second language proficiency.

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16. For an overview of the relationship between second language proficiency and syntactic com-plexity including mean length of clause/sentence, see Ortega (2003). For evidence for meanlength of clause/sentence as a reliable measure of second language proficiency, see Lu (2011).

17. How seriously South Koreans take these CSAT English listening tests is illustrated by the SouthKorean Army’s decision to halt its live-fire drills and the country’s ban on jet airplanes taking offor landing during the tests (BBC News, 15 September 2009).

18. Cho (2009, pp. 113–114) reports that in 2007, there were also 755 schools which providedlessons in the Korean language in conjunction with after-school extracurricular or additionalcourses. Strictly speaking, however, these lessons cannot be regarded as proper KSL. At anyrate, probably because they were offered as after-school lessons, the participation rate turnedout to be low, i.e. 46%, 30% and 24% of all multicultural family children enrolled at theprimary, middle school and high school level, respectively.

19. What is highly unusual in Table 10 is the number of Hankul schools in Uzbekistan: 122 schoolsfor 134 students. Either the data are inaccurate or ethnic Koreans in Uzbekistan must be verywidely dispersed in very small numbers.

20. In the USA, for instance, there were, as of November 2009, 58 primary or secondary schoolswhich offered Korean language classes, serving 5578 enrolled students (Foundation forKorean Language and Culture in USA at www.klacusa.org). In Australia, there are 49schools teaching Korean, 9 of them through the International Baccalaureate Programme(Asia Education Foundation, 2010, p. 21).

21. North Korea’s decision to choose the dialect of Pyongyang, its capital city, was largely driven byNorth Korea’s then leader Il-Sung Kim’s own ideological position, as manifested in his May1966 speech (also see Kaplan & Baldauf, 2011; C.-W. Kim, 1978; Song, 2001):In order to develop our language, we must prepare its foundation well. We must preserve thenational character of the language and develop it based on the speech of Pyongyang[,] whichis the headquarters of revolution and is the capital and cradle of all aspects of strategies andtactics of revolution including politics, economics, culture, and military affairs. But the wordPhyocwunemust be changed to another word [i.e.Mwunhwae], for it may be understood as refer-ring to the speech of Seoul, and therefore we need not use it. It is appropriate to call it by anothername; after all it is based on the speech of Pyongyang[,] which is the capital of revolution and it isdeveloped by us[,] who are building socialism. (as translated in C.-W. Kim, 1991, p. 257)

22. Note that there was a lapse of 56 years from the birth of the Unified Orthography in 1933 to theimplementation of the Revised Orthography in 1989.

23. As C.-W. Kim (1991, p. 241) puts it colourfully, ‘[o]vernight all Chinese characters weredumped into the Yellow Sea’. At one stage, the police were called on to remove shop signswritten in Chinese characters from streets (C.-W. Kim, 1978, p. 247).

24. In fact, two newspapers had already adopted the Hankul-only practice and had been publishingwithout using Hanca: Seoul Sinmun and Honam Sinmun. In particular, the latter was printed inonly Hankul from 15th August 1947 to the end of October 1956. Both newspapers discontinuedthe Hankul-only practice, citing negative feedback from their readership (Ahn, 1983, p. 105).

25. There is indeed evidence in support of Hanca contributing positively to memory and proces-sing. Park and Arbuckle (1977), for example, find that their Korean subjects rememberedwords presented in Hanca better than those presented in Hankul.

26. In North Korea, the use of Chinese characters was officially banned in 1949. The reason forthis decision was that Chinese characters would hinder the speedy development of literacy,and consequently the diffusion of communism and of the North Korea’s leader Il-SungKim’s personality cult (Song, 2001, p. 141). Indeed, ‘if the rate of literacy could be increased,the regime would be better able to exert control over the population’ (Cooper, 1989, p. 26).Moreover, the use of Chinese characters, as pointed out earlier, had historically been reservedfor the segment of the society in power or authority. Not surprisingly, ‘the use of Chinese char-acters was condemned as obsolete and reactionary’ (Kaplan & Baldauf, 2011, p. 157). Sub-sequently, however, Il-Sung Kim directed that the teaching of Chinese characters should beresurrected in North Korea’s educational system, and since 1966, Chinese characters havebeen taught at secondary and tertiary levels (Song, 2001, p. 144; for a further discussion,see note 34).

27. In view of the government’s drive for internationalization, it has been pointed out in favour ofHanca that Chinese characters constitute an international script, because one quarter of theworld’s population use them. Thus, the Twenty-First-Century Committee was led to advise

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the President of South Korea that ‘[t]o raise internationalists, Koreans must learn Chinese char-acters and the English language from primary school’ (Taylor & Taylor, 1995, p. 241).

28. One pertinent personal experience of the present writer is that he was asked in 2009 to provide aSouth Korean linguistics journal with his name in both Hankul and Chinese characters when hewas invited to join its editorial board.

29. Choi (2003, p. 123) points out that one of the major causes for this dictionary initiative was thepublication in 1992 of North Korea’s Cosenmal Tay Sajen ‘The Great Dictionary of NorthKorean’.

30. North Korea’s per capita income is less than 5% of South Korea’s (Beck, 2010).31. The lack of productivity deriving from this heavy investment in English language education is

further supported by the fact that South Korea ranked 93rd out of 147 countries in 2004 and2005 TOEFL scores (J.-K. Park 2009, p. 51). This certainly does not seem like a goodinvestment.

32. Beck (2010) estimates that reunification may cost South Korea ‘anywhere from US$ 2 trillion toUS$ 5 trillion, spread out over 30 years’. While it may probably be at the top end of reunificationcosts, Beck’s estimate clearly demonstrates the enormity of Korean reunification. No doubtthere will also be other non-economic costs involved. The South Korean government hasrecently alluded to the possibility of introducing the so-called reunification tax.

33. As one of the CILP referees points out, South Korea’s experience with these issues is not anisolated instance. Japan is also finding itself grappling with similar issues (see Gottlieb,2008), particularly the presence of many foreign residents in the country. For instance,because of ‘a rapid increase in foreign residents’, the National Institute for Japanese Languageand Linguistics (Kokuritsu Kokugo Kenkyusho; www.ninjal.ac.jp/english) has come to recog-nize as one of its core research projects the teaching and learning of Japanese as a secondlanguage.

34. Although Chinese characters are banned from North Korean books, magazines, newspapers andschool textbooks, Hanca education continues in North Korea to the effect that North Koreanstudents may learn more Chinese characters (i.e. 1500 characters at the secondary level, and500 or 1000 additional ones at the technical-college or university level, respectively) thanSouth Korean students (i.e. 1800 characters). Moreover, Hanca is only an elective subject inSouth Korea, while this does not seem to be the case in North Korea. In 1966, North Korearevoked its earlier decision and began to deliver Hanca education within its national curriculumat the behest of the then leader Il-Sung Kim, who was of the view that Chinese characters shouldbe retained in the light of the fact that they were very much in use in South Korea, and with aview to maintaining mutual intelligibility in writing in the event of reunification (Kaplan &Baldauf, 2011, p. 159; Song, 2001, p. 144).

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